Six Weeks
by syrrah
Summary: I wonder how a story with no summary would go. Is anyone game to read it? Let's see...
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

I am thin and awkward. I can't help it. Trying to gain weight, but probably too nervous. Mom claims I live on air, though in contradiction, she tells me that I can't.

"At least it doesn't cost anything," I answer, "And it's not going to run out."

She doesn't live on much herself, and nutritionally, as well as in other categories, failed the Good Mothers diploma. She failed the Good Enough Mothers diploma in most areas, really. Flying colours and a chorus of trumpets attended her award ceremony for the Barely There Mothers Award, but following form, she failed to attend it herself.

So this summer she accepted a friend's offer of a house at the beach for a whole six weeks. General idea being that we'd have some mother-daughter bonding time. Everything together - cooking, reading, shopping, strolling along the sand, watching sentimental movies. The poor friend, Philippa, had to go to Europe to attend a series of book launches and interviews for her already wildly successful first novel. Publishers had engaged in a bidding war for it, so it was famous before it had ever been read. I commiserated with Pip about her tour, telling her that I'd heard Europe is awful. Everything's really old, and people speak funny.

"Thank you Iz-bo. I'll try not to have too bad a time," she'd replied, with heavy sarcasm.

There was a condition associated with the house, and it was hairy, smelly and slobbery. An Alsation. Years ago, it had been magnificent, now it was barely continent.

"Hal needs two walks a day, and a teaspoon of this special elixir the vet made up, along with plenty of water and regular brushing."

Regular could mean anything. If it's once very two months, his next due session could fall outside of my care-taking period.

"Oh, that was a bit imprecise, wasn't it? Brush him every day to get burrs out. And mix the supplements into his dinner. No dry food - it makes him constipated. We have a standing order at the butcher, just turn up there and say you're at Philippa's place minding Hal. No cooked meat. He loves swimming but make sure his coat is completely dry before he sleeps. And a good brush after the swim so that he doesn't get eczema... Look I've made a little list of notes for you."

Handing me what is surely a manuscript for her next book. Please let it be called How To Not Kill An Elderly Dog Even When You've Got No Canine Experience And The Dog Is On Its Last Legs.

"Really, Izbo, don't look so worried. He's got a lovely nature. He's a big pussy cat, really. And he just loves it when you rub his belly."

Cat-avoider here. Just short of a cat-detester. No that's a bit strong. More accurate to say I don't see the point of them. And I'm not getting anywhere near that manky dogbelly.

With a flurry and kisses, Philippa has gone to the airport. The kisses were for Hal, by the way, not me or my mother.

Renee and I look at each other, both heads of hair still blowing in the breeze Pip's departure has whipped up.

"I'll unpack," Mom says kindly. "Why don't you take Haraldo out?"

Already, we're not doing something together.

Haraldo is snoozing in his basket in the living room, which I may have to move to the laundry, but his rheumy old eyes look kind of excited when he sees the leash in my hand. He bounds up, and staggers.

"Oh, God, fancy keeping you alive in this state when you could be in the Happy Hunting Ground chasing - um, whatever it is you'd like to chase. If you could only run," I mutter, holding up the slip collar. His eager muzzle finds the way in to the chain loop.

"No rush, Bo-Bo take your time," Mom says. "I'll put our clothes away, and sort out the groceries, and plan something for dinner. Air pie? With sky pastry and a cloud filling?"

I haven't consulted the manual, but it appears Hal knows exactly where he's going. He plods along next to me, not pulling at all, and holds his head up. He used to be a police dog, Pippa told me when she first got him. They retired him from active service when his handler died. Apparently, Hal took a bullet, but he didn't take the right one. His was removable, and non-fatal, but his handler's was neither. Hal has a medal.

The house we're staying in is on a rise and overlooks a lonely stretch of coast. This town has a few thousand people, but it's not a tourist destination, because development is prohibited. The inhabitants here are well-educated and militant and any applications for high-rises are met with stony and steely objections. Even fast-food juggernauts and clothing chain stores have failed to penetrate the wall. Artists, writers and recluses come to this place. People who like a quiet life. Apparently it's very cultured and community-minded though. Lots of dinner parties.

Pippa: "Oh, I have an invitation for Friday night, but obviously I can't go. You two go. They're lovely people and I've already told them I'm sending surrogates."

Contemplating this. I am shy, but Mom isn't. She makes a bizarre claim about herself - "Oh, I could talk the hindleg off a donkey." If you happen to come across a three-legged donkey, you'll know Renee has already passed by.

Thinking too much, and not paying attention. Hal has sprung to more life than he has so far shown, and I had no grip on the leash. He's run off.

The narrow path before me is worn into long grass and I have no difficulty following, as the sea's murmur ahead would guide me anyway. Plunge through low shrubs, duck under branches, calling.

In seconds the way has cleared and I'm on the sand. It's very, very hard to run on sand, though not for Alsations. Ahead of me, Hal is charging towards another dog. It's a bit smaller than him, black and white. I don't recognize anything except labradors and poodles, and it's not one of those.

Hal comes to an abrupt halt, standing stiff-legged, tail out like a pennant, and so does the other dog. If Hal decides he doesn't like it - won't there be a blood-bath? He is trained to kill.

From somewhere close by, two boys appear as I still struggle to run, still shouting.

I don't register much, focusing on the animal I am supposed to be responsible for.

Hal stalks to this other dog, and does the peculiar thing that these animals do. Sniffing its rear end. Gross. Reciprocation. Grosser. Some tentative tail-wagging, and I am almost there now. And then, to my astonished eyes, the other dog melts. It goes all bendy, and fawns. It rubs its head under Hal's chin, and sidles alongside him. It's either young, and recognizes his seniority, or it's a girl and is flirting disgracefully.

The sudden cessation of pounding footsteps tell me that the two boys have arrived, and Black-White must be their dog. She suddenly leaps away, with what could only be called a huge grin on her face, and before Hal can respond she's back, rubbing herself on him again. He looks absurdly pleased, and waves his tail like a flag. Hers is tucked low, and the tip of it is wagging fit to fall off.

The boys laugh. I look at them. Not boys. I can't guess ages but they're not kids. My heart had been going hard with the exertion of trying to pick up any sort of speed on such an unstable terrain as sand. Worrying that Hal, who probably has a bite like a crocodile, would tear a gaping hole in the little pretty puppy. Now, my heart is thumping to fulfill the demand of my brain, which has dictated that I blush scarlet. There is an instruction that as much blood as possible be forced north.

Because the boys are both tall and lanky. One has brown hair, one blond. Both in jeans. One a checked shirt, the other a grey t-shirt. And their faces! So beautiful, both, and different but equal. If I allowed myself secret dreams, they have the sort of looks the boys I would secretly dream about would have. Never have I laid eyes on boys this good looking in real life.

Brown raises an eyebrow at me. "Our dog likes your dog."

"Hal." Reduced to inarticulacy.

"That's your name?"

"His name."

"He's a beauty. Actually, we know him. You must be staying at Philippa's house. She said there'd be people there while she was away. This little sweetheart here is called Suzy. We got her from the shelter a couple of days ago. That's why she hasn't met Hal yet. Looks like they're going to get along just fine."

Blond speaks. "I'm Jas, and this is Edward. We live a couple of streets from you."

Expectant pause. Am I supposed to shake hands or something? Oh, they're waiting for my name.

"Isabella." The awkward is out in force. Absolutely my defining characteristic right now.

"So," Brown says, after another pause. "Normally, Hal and Philippa walk to the far end - see those rocks over there? - and then Pippa stops in at the cafe for a coffee, and then they walk back through town. Everyone stops to say hi to Hal, he's a bit of local personality. Is that what you're going to do?"

"I don't know. I didn't read the instructions before I came out."

Brown and Blond both frown and bend closer, trying to catch my voice. It's so quiet, nearly danced away by the light wind.

"Instructions?" Blond asks, smiling. "From Philippa? That would be right."

Hal and Suzy are now cavorting - well, Suzy is. She's sinuous and playful, winding herself around him and nipping at wherever she can reach. He's dignified, standing with his neck arched and tail high, and allowing her liberties.

"She's still a pup, eight months old, full of energy," Brown remarks, following my gaze. "She's a honey."

Iz-bo, open your inner dictionary, and find a word or two. A sentence would be even better. You are full of words for school assignments, and during exams have to raise your hand asking for extra sheets. Ideas spill and won't be quenched. Streams and streams of them.

"Are you on holiday too?" is a start. Too bad it's idiotic, since Blond already said they live here.

"Yes," Blond says. "From university."

Without me noticing, we've started walking. Hal is next to my left leg, Suzy is everywhere at once, and Blond is on my right. Brown is ahead, walking backwards.

"You might trip up," I warn him. Blond sniggers.

"You'd tell me if there was something behind me, wouldn't you?" Brown asks, and I open my mouth to do just that as a pinto flash stills into Suzy at the back of knees. I'm not quick enough and he's a tumble of long legs, curses and laughter. Suzy is happy to have him at her level, and there is doglick on his face.

"Hey man, that was hilarious. I am totally going to train Suzy to do that several times a day," Blond says, and Brown lunges for him. Now they're both in the sand, wrestling. Is this what boys do?

Trading good-natured insults. "Get off me, you gay bastard." "Stop holding my hand." "If you tear my shirt I'll..." "You'll what, wimp? You're not strong enough to do anything." and so on.

They get up and brush themselves off.

"Well, that was mature," from Blond.

"It takes two. You're older. You should be the bigger man and walk away from confrontation."

I'm fascinated and baffled. Vaguely remembering from times ago at school when boys wanted to impress girls, and they'd get really silly. The silliness wasn't impressive to girls, although the boys rolled over one another on the ground throwing fake punches that sometimes got real. Sorting out alphas. I don't know why two boys who must be around twenty or so would behave like this now on a beach in front of a reticent girl with no figure and a verbal block.

Along, along. Walking with people I've never met before. I'm not normally incautious, but surely Hal, attack-trained and a protector, would alert me to any threat? He knows these two, he did give them a cursory sniff when they first came up to him. He's not worried.

They chat to me. Well, Blond does.

"Are you at school?" he asks.

"Just finished."

"What are going to do now?"

"I'm waiting on hearing back from U-Dub."

"What did you apply for?"

"God, Jas, give her a break, and stop prying. She only wanted a quiet walk on the beach."

They must be brothers. Would friends talk like this? I know very little about guys. No brothers, no boyfriends. Not even a dad. Oh, there's a male around now. Hal is in my life - if that counts. Not really, it doesn't.

"Sorry Isabella. Shut up, Edward."

"This is where we turn off for the cafe. Do you want to come with us? It's fine to take the dogs."

"I didn't bring my wallet. I don't have any money," I answer.

"Oh, we can afford a coffee."

Close quarters now, sitting at a table near the door. The dogs are outside, Hal lying head on paws, because he is obedient, Suzy lying with a lolling tongue and sparkling eyes next to him.

Our voices are softer without having to raise them. Theirs are deep and musical and I'm glad they both talk a lot. I like hearing them.

Blond forgets, or decides to ignore Brown's ban on questioning me, and says, "How long are you here for?"

"Six weeks," I answer.

"Cool," he says. "We can take you around, introduce you to some people, show you the sights. It'll be fun."

Six weeks of fun. With me?

Don't they have anything else to do?

.

.


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

And if not everyone, half the town know Hal. It would take me a year to get through here if we stopped for all the admirers seeking audience. Philippa, change his name to Councillor, or Mayor or Popstar or something... Distribute paw autographs.

"Nice to see you. Got to get going now," Brown and Blond keep saying, and that's the only way we get through.

"World's most popular dog," I remark.

"More than a dog. He's a civic entity," from Brown.

Meandering back towards Pip's house, Suzy fun, Brown and Blond snarking, me with the occasional comment.

"This is our street," Blond says at one corner. "Nice to meet you, Isabella. Hey, um, there's a party on Saturday night, if you're not doing anything... Here's my phone. Put your number in. I'll text you the details. Edward and I can collect you on our way past. It's walking distance. Everything's walking distance here."

What do I do now? He held his phone up so confidently I took it.

Brown mutters an incredulous and barely audible, "Jas, you fucking stalker!"

I add my name and number to the contacts list, and Blond says, "Okey dokey. See you!"

"Opportunistic prick." Next mutter from Brown.

Hissed, "_Fuck off_," from Blond.

Two guys vying for me? Impossible. Could there be a girl drought in this place?

Hal and I pace sedately back to Renee's air pie which turns out to be lentil and vegetable.

"How was your walk?"

"Invigorating."

"I thought so. You looked a little flushed when you came in. Must be the sea air. How about we clean up in here and then raid Pippa's dvd collection?"

"Sure. I'll just see to Hal, and I'll be right with you."

Brush the dog, feed the dog, give it a bit of a scratch behind the ears because it was mostly so well-behaved today. You're not a bad old thing, Hairy. Besides the smell.

"Ooh, and let's raid the liquor cabinet as well. Pippi said to make ourselves at home. What's this red stuff - Campari! You want to try one?"

I really, really like that sound of ice-cubes floating in liquid and knocking against the sides of a glass. But I discover I don't like Campari. At all. It's bitter and nasty. The red drinks go down the kitchen sink and we crack into the Midori, which is lurid green, and nice with bubbly water. Red for stop, green for go. Obvious.

"Hmm," Renee says a minute later, perusing Pippa's shelves. "Pedro Almodóvar? Never heard of him. Tim Burton - that rings a bell. Oh look, Edward Scissorhands. Wasn't that a kids' film? Why would she have that? Who's Jane Campion... Oh, I don't know what to choose. You pick something, Bo-bo."

Pippa's eclectic and varied selection is so delicious I could get lost here as the world spins and not be found for decades. And I know perfectly well that Renee is not as fluffy as she pretends to be. It is an act she has cultivated out of a deep-seated insecurity so that people will underestimate her and she can stay one step ahead of the game. I select Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and we settle back into the couches and cushions, melon drinks to hand, and prepared to be comfortable for as long as it takes.

"That was perfect," Renee sighs, two hours later. "So lush and spectacular, and so poignant...the impossible love, the intertwined destinies... and how handsome was that bandit? Shall we take kung fu classes, Bo-bo? I want to be silent and swift and graceful and deadly."

My mother is an eternal teenager. She really does want those things, as opposed to a mortgage and health insurance and superannuation and a national calling plan. I go to give her an affectionate hug and she gives me a fervent one.

"Love you Bo-bo."

In bed, my dreams are in slow motion, with me wanting to leap and climb. Dance across rooftops. I want to tame wild men. And enwilden my tame self.

Morning brings Renee singing Madonna in the kitchen and Hal pleased to see me, thumping his tail on the floor. He's in the kitchen too, enjoying the concert. You wouldn't call Renee a nightingale, but thankfully she puts the blender on and drowns herself out for a little while.

"Health drink," she announces. "Beet, carrot, celery and apple. With spirulina."

"Looks horrible, Mom. Thanks."

Quite nice, despite the appearance. Certainly better than Campari.

"Honey, do you want to alternate with Hal's walks? One of us does the morning, one the afternoon? Then we'll meet up in the middle of the day for lunch and trips and shopping and relaxing, or whatever. How does that sound?"

It sounds like a plan. Wonder if Suzy's walk times are the same every day. Wonder if Brown and Blond will be on the beach with her this afternoon. Wonder if they'll go for coffee again, with me. Don't students get jobs in the summer? Or if they come from wealthy families and don't need to get jobs, don't they go to Aspen or somewhere? No, because skiing is for winter. Anyway, if I go to the beach this afternoon and loiter, I'll find out. They'll be there or they won't.

"That'll be great, Mom."

"I'll take him this morning then. Shall we make plans for later or play it by ear? Whatever you want - this is your holiday darling, as well as mine. We're both carefree. There are no rules, except for Pippa's rules. I saw that great tome she left about how to treat Hal's earwax and brush his teeth and keep his toenails clean."

"That's only about one-tenth of the regimen we're supposed to get through before 8 am. Then there's the rest. We have to play him Mozart and read to him from the encyclopedia."

"Between us we'll accomplish the lot before nightfall, I have every confidence."

Back home, Mom rarely displays humor, and neither do I. Demands of work and home and school keep us busy and concentrated and serious. Here, a clock will not regulate our days, and deadlines will not dictate time usage. We can cut loose a little. Crack jokes. What else?

I look through the bookcase and take out Love In The Time Of Cholera, and Renee takes out Hal.

"This first day's just about doing nothing much, right?" she says on her return.

Yes.

"Lunch, baby? Casual, right?" Salad and tuna-fish. Raspberry iced tea.

She finds a book too, and curls into the other couch, sandals slung to the floor, feet on the cushions with knees bent. We're contented, together apart, breathing the same air, but inhabiting different worlds.

Beside us, sliding bi-fold doors let in wafting sea whispers and other beach sounds; laughter, bird calls, dogs. Hal's ear cocks in his sleep even as his legs twitch. He could be chasing butterflies or criminals.

Five in the afternoon, my feet are already pointing at the door. Though a number affixed to a unit of time measurement will not tell me how to spend my day, this is when Suzy was at the beach yesterday. Hal would like to see Suzy.

Unerringly, we find our path to the bay, wide stretch of pale sand, swirls of broken waves and bubbling foam. And neither Hal nor I are unvisited by our newest friends.

Right below our place, right where our path comes out, Suzy is in wriggling ecstasy, tail flashing like a whip. Blond and Brown are throwing a stick for their furry fetcher, but once she has lopingly retrieved it, she doesn't return it to them. She presents it to regal Hal.

"Hoped we'd see you. We're kind of lurking. Not in a creepy way," Blond admits, getting the stick back. Throwing it again.

My eyes track the trajectory, which seems attention-deserving. I'm trying to think of my next remark. Children are dumb to say how hot the day is - I'm dumb to say anything else.

"Quite hot today, isn't it?" Brilliant.

"Balmy, though," Brown says. A quick look at him, but his glance is over the waves. "Not humid. That's a relief."

Very few people say balmy.

Tacit agreement - we all walk. Blond talks.

"So, Isabella, what are your plans while you're here? There's a sports club. We could take you to play tennis or squash. Do you like markets? We have a weekly market. A bit of produce, and some arts and craft stuff. Knick knacks, too. The cafe has live music four nights a week. Jazz, folk, jazz, folk. The community centre shows classic movies on Sunday evenings - they throw cushions and bean bags on the floor and you nestle in. Then from nine they show horrors. Zombies, vampires, gorefest - it's fun. You should come. People really pull out the stops here for summer. There's an annual dog race, although you might have to leave H-a-l at home for that one, because it would kill him, no offense meant. We'll put S-u-z-y in of course, but she's bound to chase her tail instead of running on the actual course. We have an international food festival, too, over a couple of weeks, and you can get cheeses and chorizo..."

Brown's hands are in his pockets. "Jesus, you go _on_. Let's just print her the brochure, Jas."

"Oh, get fucked. What's your problem?"

I like Jas going on. It's something I don't do. Well, internally I do, but not out loud. I couldn't.

And thankfully, we're all proceeding along the sand, cafe-wards.

"Actually, Bella, we'll probably be seeing you on Friday night. Our Mom had invited Pippa for a dinner party, but Pip said she'd be away, and she'd send her house-minders as her representatives. That would be you, wouldn't it?" Blond mentions.

Heavens. Plunged immediately into the pulsing heart of the social scene in this rarified enclave. Renee will talk the wings off a low-flying duck, and I will sit in a corner, not contributing - observing. Both of us doing what we do best.

"I guess so. Is there a dress code?" I ask.

"Fancy dress," Blond nods.

I'm still gulping like a goldfish - because what on earth am I going to wear? - when Brown helps me out, "Come as yourself. Ignore Jasper because he's a dickhead."

"So he's going to be dressed as a not-dickhead?" I say.

Brown reveals sparkling, fucking sparkling teeth as he laughs. Rows and rows of them. Blond reveals amused mild annoyance, which abates like the spray on the wavecrests.

"Coffee for you, Bellatrix?" he asks.

"I'll get it," Brown says quickly.

"I'll get three coffees. I have money. I sold a family heirloom," I say, and they don't know me yet. They both look alarmed.

"No, I didn't," I hasten to say. "I sold a half-bottle of nail-varnish. You'd be amazed what people will buy on ebay."

We drink our coffees and chat, and I have to say the way they're regarding me has changed just the slightest bit. Yesterday I was just a girl. Today I spoke, and they don't know what to make of me.

It's all okay though. I think.

"Do you have any food allergies we should tell Mom about?" Blond asks, leaning back in his chair and shoving his legs out in front of him. They're very long. I can't help looking, but he doesn't seem to notice.

"No."

"Cool. You're staying here with your mom, right? So she'll be coming too? Does she have any particular likes or dislikes?"

"Not really. Well, I don't think she likes sea-urchin."

"That'll be off the menu then."

The waitress brings the check, smiling at the boys. They nod to her. She's young and pretty. Her smile does not extend to me. I pick the check up.

Protesting from both of them, and they really don't want to let me pay for the coffees. They both pull their wallets out. They're prepared to dispute me over this, and fight one another.

They're being old-fashioned.

"I'll get it," I say.

"But we've got jobs over the holidays, and you don't," Blond says.

"What jobs? Dog-walking?" I ask. "This won't send me to the poorhouse. I've still got half a bottle of nail-varnish I can sell, remember."

Someone mutters the word "stubborn," and I don't know which one of them it was, because I am at the counter, paying.

Outside, we begin the Procession of the Splendor of Hal.

Blond is the more talkative of the brothers, and he is happy to exchange pleasantries with everyone who greets Hal. Brown isn't actually aloof - he's perhaps just slightly less interactive.

"Your dinner party isn't really fancy dress, is it?" I ask him in an undertone.

"There's a few people coming, and some of them will turn up in whatever they've been wearing all day, and some of them will make an occasion of it. That's what it's like around here. You could wear a velvet gown or jeans, and either would be appropriate," he tells me.

It won't be a velvet gown, you can be assured of that.

We're outside the beach house, and they've gone right past their turn-off. Hal knows he's home and heads straight for the door, while Suzy is pulling on her leash, nose pointed towards the woods beyond the house, muzzle in the air sniffing. Once she realizes Hal's not at her side though, she immediately turns back to him. She's so smitten, all puppy love for the majestic one. Dark eyes shining at her, ears alert, he stands tall and proud, and then they bend into one another. Collie and alsation. Black, white, gold and tan, circling and encircling. Neither of them care she's so young and he's older. Yesterday must have been a dog epiphany for both of them, the discovery of mutual attraction on eight legs.

"Want to make a date for tomorrow?" Blond says. "Enable our canine Romeo and Juliet here? Samson and Delilah?"

"Those pairings didn't end happily," I demur, and Brown looks keenly at me.

"Do any?"

Two words hang, float, hover, until they dissipate.

"Five o'clock," I say.

.

.

_Children are dumb to say how hot the day is_ by Robert Graves


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

What day is it? I don't know. Doesn't matter. They're all sunny, blue skies, blue water. Someone banished clouds. I wake with the diamond light, the seabreeze shifting of the net curtains. No matter when I rise, Mom's in the kitchen, healthing us up. The time she put onion in the drink wasn't good. We learned the next morning that the taste hadn't come off the plastic of the blender's canister. Onion chemically alters plastic. We tried everything we could think of to neutralize the offense - vanilla, toothpaste, bicarb. It took hours before it was safe again.

I've mentioned Brown and Blond to her.

"I'd better come down this afternoon and check them out," she said.

"That won't be necessary. You'll meet them on Friday," I say. Firmly.

"Oh, Friday. That dinner party business. Pip said the family are nice. The husband's some sort of doctor, the wife is arty. All right, I'll meet your two caballeros on Friday. I guess I'll just have to be patient."

When Hal and I arrivel home at half past seven in the evening, she wolf-whistles.

"They're both gorgeous," she says casually.

There are binoculars out on the coffee table.

"Oh, Mom, you _didn't_!"

"Great view of the beach from our deck." Casually.

"You _spied_?"

"Never underestimate a mother's curiosity. That's all I'm saying."

"Never underestimate a daughter's mortification."

Even so, we're having a perfect vacation. She's gregarious and I'm introverted, so she takes Hal along the main strip, and has already befriended every storeowner, every office-worker, and every passerby she happens to come across. I've only met Brown and Blond. Renee has her morning jaw exercises, she and I meet up back at the house. We go to the little galleries, or wherever, and I browse and she inserts herself into the lives of the community. Suits us both.

Then I walk Hal on the beach, and every afternoon, Blond and Brown and Suzy are there. One day the brothers are both in shorts and shirtless and wet. Behind sunglasses, I stare until my eyes might bleed.

"Wear your swimsuit tomorrow, Isabella. Come into the water," Blond says.

But there isn't enough of me to put into a swimsuit. I'm still wearing little girl sizes. Me putting a bra on is a gratuity. I haven't worn a swimsuit since all the girls except me hit puberty. I don't even have one.

"Nah. I'm good," I answer. "Not much of a swimmer. Shark-shy, too."

"We'll look after you. Notice this is a shark-free zone? That's because of us. We keep them away."

"How?"

"Oh, it's easy. Scientific, biological, and easy. Edward has a special shark repellant. He just gets into the water and releases a highly toxic gas - "

His words turn into grunts, as Brown tackles him. Boy humor. Fart jokes. Boy behavior. Playfights. Boy energy. Restless, active, lively. They're such aliens.

Then evenings with Renee and me. Food, giggling, washing up, a movie or more reading. E-mails. Chatter that goes everywhere, or stays to discuss the film or the book. She likes everything I do. She was only pretending she hadn't heard of Almodovar. She knows exactly who Antonio Banderas is. She can imitate his accent.

"What are we wearing tomorrow?" she asks on Thursday. "How formal will this occasion be? Have you asked your _friends_?"

Whenever Renee mentions Brown and Blond, it's like they have to be italicized, emphasized. She wants me to have a romance.

"Do you like one of them more than the other? Have either of them indicated any interest in you? Was it the one you like?"

"Mom, I'm not going to try starting something up with a guy who lives hundreds of miles from me."

She'd never warn me off a boy over a little thing like geography, like him living in a different state. "There are these marvelous things somebody invented called _telephones_. And some other things called _aeroplanes_. Give one of those boys a kiss, Bo-bo, if you think you like him."

About clothes. Can we talk about clothes?

"And as for tomorrow, Edward said we should just wear whatever we want. There'll be other people there too, and he said some people will dress up, some will be casual."

I don't tell her that I privately call my _friends_ after their hair color. Too personal.

"Well, I don't know about you, but I feel the need for something new. Let's take Pippa's car tomorrow and go driving. We'll go along the coast, have lunch somewhere. Go to some amazing little boutique where all the clothes are one-offs, and buy something that no-one else will have. What say you?"

"Say I that I agree."

"Good! That's decided. Now, let's watch a movie with handsome men in it. Just for a change."

That gets my vote, too.

Eleven the next morning we lock up, leaving Haraldo snoozing on the deck with his waterbowl and a bone in proximity, and his very own shade umbrella tilted just so. Instructions were in the ridiculously over-detailed Book of Hal.

Coast roads are nice. Spectacular in parts. Nerve-wracking for the vertigo-afflicted. Nerve-wracking for anyone who thinks they'd like to arrive at their destination uninjured, still in the car they set out in, as opposed to an ambulance. Renee drives like she does most other things, so she's inspired and free-thinking and not too weighed down by strict observation of rules. Straying over the yellow line. I try not to yelp and clutch her arm, as it wouldn't be helpful. At least when there's oncoming traffic she veers back into the correct lane. I resolve to take the wheel on the return journey.

We stop at a little town for lunch and reconnoiter. Inspect some stores. Renee buys things straight away. Jewelery, sandals. I'm so diffident about the shopping experience. I take a pretty garment into a changing room, then in the mirror see it turned to a shapeless sack, with a pair of bony knees sticking out underneath it.

By the afternoon Renee has made several purchases. She's way ahead, declaring herself in love with every single item in one of the stores. The dress she's found is very her. Two rectangles of fabric, seamed cleverly to create a simple and very striking garment. Both bordered in turquoise, with bold, bold flower splashes, a high neckline, and a hem brushing her knee. At her insistence I've bought one t-shirt. It's navy blue with silver, glittery patterns, and will be my dinner party attire.

A quick walk for Hal this afternoon, because Renee wants to do my make-up, and we're due at our hosts by seven.

Brown and Blond have to be quick, too.

"Jasper's making salad," Brown says. "You've been warned."

"Edward's doing bruschetta," Blond says. "Be very afraid."

"No sea urchin?" I remind them.

"Not in the bruschetta," Brown assures me.

"Then what was that grey slimy stuff you were toiling over? You said tapenade but it didn't look like olives to me," Blond says.

I do like one of them better than the other, as it happens. Neither of them have indicated any interest in me though. I mean besides the seeing me every day. Which could be Hal and Suzy related. Oh, Blond did invite me to a party. He got my phone number. He messaged me with an address and a time. But none of their interest has been interpretable as anything more than friendly. Neighborly. Polite but pretty impersonal. Nothing to tell Renee about.

Back at the house she's singing again, and the song isn't even recognizable, but her good mood is endearing. She looks lovely. Such flair. Her necklace and earrings aren't a set, the earrings match her dress but the necklace doesn't, her sandals are a different color again, but the whole ensemble works. She misses glamorous by a mile, but glamorous is fake and forced. Renee looks real and very pretty. I look like a thin, self-conscious girl in jeans who tried hard to find a sparkly top. That's actually what I am.

Then Renee gets out her make-up kit, and croons, "Sit still, Bo-bo," selecting shades and getting busy. My eyes are closed, but I feel layers going on - the crease, the inner corner, the outer corner. This could be very scary, considering the palette she's wearing tonight. I could be a psychedelic panda.

But when I look in the mirror - "Oh, _Mom_."

I barely look made-up, and yet her artistry has rendered my eyes huge and limpid. They have changed shape and color. Tonight the moon will orbit them. My mother has dark powers and may be a witch. How did I not know this before?

We consult the note Pippa left on the fridge, giving the address, and we walk there. Musical sounds greet us. Talking and laughing and Madeline Peyroux. Blond.

"Isabella! And you must be Renee. Please come in. I'm Jasper. What can I get you to drink? Come and meet my parents. Let me show you around. There's a bathroom through here, by the way."

A charming host. He gets us sparkling wine. He steers us through the living room, towards his parents. They are charming too - and so attractive. Blond takes after his father, also blond. Brown takes after his mother, also a brunette, with that reddish cast Brown's hair has in the sun. His mother has it indoors.

"Renee, Isabella, this is my mother Esme and my father Carlisle."

Esme immediately wants to take to Renee about the dress. I catch part of the conversation, though I'm looking for someone, trying not to be obvious.

"That dress is fabulous! It looks like a Queen Mab design."

"It is! That's the label! I bought it yesterday in a tiny store a couple of hours north of here."

"I know the place you mean. They have the exclusive contract to sell Queen Mab creations. I met the designer recently and she's actually coming along tonight. Her name is Alisha, and you're going to love her..."

I have nothing to add, having little interest in fashion, and less knowledge. Blond is at my side as soon as he notices I'm alone.

"Come and meet some other people, Isabella. Oh, God, not these two. Quick, look the other way - pretend you didn't see them - oh, shit, too late. Hey, Bear. Hi Gypsy."

A couple. A big guy and a tall girl. Brown and Blond are tall, and so are their parents. And now these two. Are Renee and I the smallest people here?

"Jasper, you're a tool. Hello Isabella. Do you come here often?" Bear says.

"This is my first time."

"So you're not a friend of Jasper's?"

"I'm a friend of Suzy's."

Brown appears at last, and he bears a large plate laden with mini-toasts. Each has a smear of something dark, then a strip of green leaf, and a slice of cherry tomato. The bruschetta.

"Oh, Edward, just telling Isabella here that Jasper's a tool," Bear says. "You're one as well, of course."

"Bear, the hospital called. They know you escaped and they've instructed me to put you in restraints until they can get here in the security vehicle to pick you up. They recommended a gag, too."

"Sure. Hold me down."

Gypsy hasn't spoken. I take some bruschetta and it's very nice. The green stuff is basil.

"This is good. It must have taken you ages to prepare," I tell Brown.

"Well, you know," he shrugs. I do. But I don't.

He's gone, and I turn to these others. "So, Bear. Polar?"

"Grizzley," he amends.

Gypsy still doesn't say a word, but Bear is easy. Affectionate abuse of the Cullen brothers. That's their surname? Brown and Blond? He's at university with them. Jasper's a tool - he's studying history. History's dead, man. Edward's studying music. He's a tool. If you have to read about it you haven't got it. History and music - for Chrissake! Bear is going to build bridges. He's doing something real.

"Why are you called Bear?"

Hands held out. "Big paws."

Yeah, they're enormous.

Esme Cullen calls us to another room, and it's time for the starter. Chilled lemon soup. Okay.

The seating plan has been predetermined and I'm waiting for the person next to me to be seated before I dip my spoon into my bowl. I'm waiting for someone else to go first to make sure they don't die, or gag.

Brown eases into the chair next to me.

"Coping?" he says. "I'm glad you could come."

"All good," I say.

"Thank fuck I can relax now. How do you like the soup?"

Weird, but tolerable. I think it, I say it aloud.

"Yeah," he agrees. "I told her. Would she listen?"

I fold my napkin, not like a paper plane, just in a nervous fashion.

"Hey, my duties are over. Next course is sweet potato casserole. How about I get us a bowl each and we sit outside?"

"Would that be rude?"

"Not rude. Wise. We can dodge the salad, and Jasper won't know."

Our conspiracy is interrupted when something small and colorful and shot from a cannon bursts into the room.

"You started without me?" it accuses, voice high and clear and bell-like. Everyone turns to see the source of the commotion and Esme rises swiftly.

"Alisha, I'm so glad you could make it. How lovely to see you! I've been singing your praises everywhere. Your ears must have been burning!"

Alisha, human bullet, is mollified and smiles at her hostess, then unabashedly scrutinizes the guests. She zeroes in immediately on Renee.

"You're wearing my scarf dress!" she trills. "I'm Queen Mab!"

Alisha, human bullet, is tiny and loud. Renee gushes about loving the garment, Esme gushes about how wonderful Alisha is, and Alisha allows herself to be the centre of attention, delicately sipping at her lemon soup. Straight into the meaning of cobalt - apparently it's under-utilized. All conversation has been re-directed. She makes proclamations, and then magnetizes, drawing comments back to her.

Brown nudges me with his elbow, distracting me from the spectacle.

"Come outside. We have frangipani. You grab our drinks, I'll get the food."

I love frangipani.

It's not as if anyone notices us go.

There may be more than one deck attached to this house, apparently. There may be more than one dimension. I thought he meant we'd be right outside the dining room, but I'm taken through a couple of rooms, and up some stairs, and out onto a vista of sea and stars, with the canopy of a frangipani at our feet. The carpet of a frangipani.

Music drifts up to us, the inexpressibly sad and evocative scent of the flowers, and the chatter and hum of people downstairs.

"This is delicious," I enthuse about the casserole, rich, piquant, creamy. Just a minute - bruschetta, lemon soup, sweet potato casserole...

"You're vegetarians?"

"Yes."

It's quiet up here, other than the sounds of our forks in the pottery bowls.

I don't know why I've been invited to eat privately with Brown. Can I chatter? Effortlessly relate anecdotes and artlessly talk about myself and throw in leading questions about him? Can I heck.

I'm shy anyway, and just quietly - Brown is the one I like.

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	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

Turns out that with prompting, with a fearless leader, I _can_ chat. Brown breaks the ice, saying this and that. A couple of questions, which turn into a couple more before I've even realized I'm talking about myself. Not my best subject, really. Evening things up, I ask him, too.

"So what are these holiday jobs you two have?"

Blond tutors history students, and Brown proofreads articles their father writes for medical journals. Both brothers work a couple of hours a day, in the mornings.

"So what about you, Isabella? Do you have a job?"

I do, yes, although I've taken six weeks off for this vacation. Renee works in a law firm, assistant to one of the partners. They needed their paper records converted to electronic files, and Renee got me the gig. I scan documents and archive them.

"You're an archivist? Sounds impressive."

"That's a little grandiose for what I do. It isn't interesting at all. I just put documents in the machine, press the button, take them out again, then go to the scanner file on the computer and move the pdf's to the appropriate folder."

"Okay. Maybe not so impressive. What did you apply for at U-Dub?"

"A double degree. English and education."

He seems quite happy to talk to me even though I am the most boring person on earth. He even smiles. But after a while he picks up both the bowls and stands and says, "They must be onto the dessert by now. Fig and walnut tart. Just you wait."

I'll wait. I'll wait up here for him to bring me some, but it seems we're both going back downstairs. Disappointed.

And downstairs, Renee is asking Alisha why she called her label Queen Mab.

"Oh, it's my initials," Alisha says breezily. "Mari Alisha Brandenberg. And Queen Mab brings people sweet dreams. Interesting, isn't it? Do you dream of what you wish for - or do you wish for what you dream of?"

Sparks an avalanche of responses. These are responsive people. They want to discuss, and they're outspoken and educated and they think and they're engaged. Renee has thrown off the cloak of forgetfulness she wears so often, and is not being ditzy. She has a point of view. This is more her scene, anyway, talking about ideas - not facts. My mother, in her enjoyment, her element.

And the attendees are not expected to sit for the dessert. We're encouraged to mingle, eating without utensils, paper napkins provided to wipe the stickiness. Everyone's licking though. Sweet, syrupy, yummy goodness making us grin like kids, fingers knuckle-deep in our mouths.

The evening wraps up, and Renee and I walk back. We had brought Hal, so he could spend time with Suzy. He sees us home.

"You missed some fascinating conversation. What a bunch of interesting characters! That Alisha's a wildcard. And what a beautiful house. So you and Edward - ?"

"We just ate."

Sorting ourselves out for sleep once we're home. I give old Hal a cuddle, he's quite the prince, really. All that fur, and his strong, faithful heart. He and Suzy were snoozing covered in one another - I wished I'd taken a photo for Pippa. Mom may have mentioned Suzy in emails. It would be nice for Pip to know Hal has found love in his twilight years.

And I know Hal dreams - he's barely coiled himself into that basket before he whimpers and shuffles. He must be climbing mountains and fighting off villains.

Cool at first, my bed heats with me in it, and Queen Mab brings me no such adventures.

And Saturday morning, azure, the party tonight is ahead of me.

Today's walk on the beach is casual and fine.

"See you later on?" Blond and Brown. "We'll come by. At eight." Scuffle. Some ankle kicking. What are they - four years old?

I have one dress, and Renee insists I wear it.

"_Edward_'s going to be there, isn't he?" she smiles.

"Well, yes - But, Mom - "

She's sitting me down and doing the eye-shadow thing on me again, with her clever touch, and her subtle blending. The colors have names like mauve and smoke. They have effects like deepening and enlarging. Maybe I'll get her to do this every day. Maybe I won't. I'm not sure if the artifice makes me confident or uncomfortable.

My dress is creamy white, with bold floral patterns in block shades of brown and yellow. Retro and cool, not like me. Across the top of my breasts is a brown band, and across the hem another, just below knee length. It's held over my shoulders by four brown straps.

Renee says, "_Bobo_!" in approval, and you don't want your mother's approval, surely. I think I'll go and tear it off and get back into jeans, but the doorbell has already rung. I'm in combat boots, at least, retaining some me-ness.

Brown and Blond both politely try to hide that they're giving me the up-and-down. I try to hide that I'm aware of it. So a frock and steelcaps is okay.

Renee has said, "Have fun," and, "Don't get drunk," and I fully intend to heed her advice, heading into the glowing night behind the sunset with two boys whose smiles warm me.

We arrive, and Brown remains as attentive as he's been on the walk. Blond is, too, but when he wanders off somewhere I see him stop on the way back, and see that Alisha is there. He says something that makes her laugh, then she makes him laugh, and then he's with her for ten minutes. Stretching to twenty. He doesn't come back.

Brown: "Would you like a drink?"

"Yes."

Holding my hand to pull me through the throng, as this party is well-attended, Brown steers me to the kitchen and a margarita machine, and plastic cups.

"It's too crowded here," he frowns.

I've only managed a sip, and I'm jostled, near to spilling, crashing lightly into him.

"Let's go out to the deck."

It's so lovely - moonlight splintered on the rippled water, stars sending their reflections to bask in there, prompting their twinkles to fly back home, the dark a nameless color.

"We have this oceanic view - don't we? All the way to the horizon." Him.

I agree. "Panoramic. And all the way to the moon."

"The myriad of stars," he nods.

"The panoply of them."

He inclines his head, gaze curious and a little sharpened. "Did you do today's crossword, in the Chronicle?"

"No. Philippa doesn't get the Chronicle."

"Well, I usually do it every day but I missed this morning. You want to have a go?"

"You brought the newspaper?"

"I'll look it up on my phone."

"I'm sure that's not really approved party conduct."

"I don't care."

We're back in the living room, walking through and around people. There's just enough room on the end of the couch for one person to perch. I'm taken there.

"I'll sit on the floor," he says, folding himself down, eyes intent on the little glowing screen, fingers scrolling. My hem is above the knee now, risen up, but only three or four inches. It's not like there's an expanse of thigh on show for every man and his uncle to see. Where he's sitting, my knee is near his nose, but I decide not to worry, with my second cupful from that margarita machine. It's a liquid silver purveyor of non-worriedness, which I tip icily but carefully down my throat.

"One of the clues was 'splendid array', 7 letters," he remarks. "Panoply fits. That's what made me think of it."

I need to lean forward to hear, because of the thumping music. "You said you didn't do the crossword today."

"I looked, but I didn't have anything to write with," he replies. Voice a little raised, head a little turned back towards me, he reads clues.

"Synopsis - 10 letters."

I know it. "Abridgment."

"Connection - 7 letters."

Possibilities: "Ah - joining? Harmony? Rapport?"

"Rapidity - 8 letters."

"Deftness? Alacrity?" Words, glorious words.

He mutters, "I going to find a pen. Wait here."

Back soon, he curls his long legs back down, and reads on.

"Feverish - 7."

"Flushed? Febrile? Burning?"

"I need to write these down," he says. "Do you mind?" and he starts to write on my leg, between my knee and my hem. His elbow is sprawled across both my thighs as he inscribes on me, and his shoulder blocks my view.

Mind? I'm _shocked_, and I flinch.

"It helps if I write the answers. Am I hurting you?"

"Um - no." Honestly. It doesn't hurt. It's only a biro. But suddenly, words have become something else. I can't see what he's doing, I just feel the needle point of the pen moving over me in indecipherable spider-tracks, and I quiver, head to toe. My muscles flickering in sensuous tension.

"Tumultuous - 8," he continues, as though this is nothing much.

"Frenzied? Agitated?"

Writes more answers. All confined to the same space, not pushing my dress up at all, finding plenty of room on my not-so-plentiful flesh. So casually you'd think he does this every day.

Rudely though, and unexpectedly, the guy at the other end of the couch lights a cigarette, and the brief flare of phosphorous comes to my nostrils. I love it. Not so much the following exhalation, at which I cough.

"Could you do that somewhere else?" Edward asks him abruptly, evincing annoyance.

"I'm comfortable here, thanks," smoking-man shrugs. And he doesn't budge when I cough again, suggesting, "You could always go outside."

Brown mutters, "Asshole", and rises, taking my hand again, pulling me with him. We do go outside. The back of the house has the beachside deck - the front a verandah. He takes me to the streetside and a group of people are gathered at the front door and steps. They're excited, loud, drunken.

We turn the corner to where it's quieter, and Brown leans lazily against the railing, hands to my waist, holding me loosely. Singing along quietly to the song playing from inside - voice tuneful and pleasant. Fire in my veins now, head fuzzy. There's low light here and he's haloed. He's gorgeous.

"Bella," he murmurs, sliding one hand upwards, missing parts of me entirely, until his fingers arrive gently at my cheek. I recognize this move, though no-one's done it to me particularly like this before. I know his intent, and his invitation. We tilt our faces, and his lips are brushing mine, so lightly. Leaning in to accept this, I'm off-kilter, having raised my hands to his chest for support. Then he's not brushing - more than that. Mouth so soft, so warm, so soft. It's caressing, nudging, prompting, slightly open, but not enough to fall into. The hand to my face swerves down, arms looped around me now, and the kiss changes. It firms and his lips unseal mine. The sure, wet, slippery entry of his tongue, warmer than the night around us, and his hands curve down to my backside. Fingers spread wide, he pulls me to his hips.

I've been kissed before - and more. I've had sex, but previous boys have been politer than this. They haven't steered my pelvis onto their groin, blatantly, at the first contact. I'm the quiet girl, the withdrawn one. The sexy boys haven't sought me out, when they can go for the girls with reputations.

But this - this - tongue in me and a soft groan in his throat, and my body flush up against him as he bears my weight. Where he's holding me, what I can feel... He's making no attempt to hide himself. His dick is solid and real and _hard_ jutting into my belly - and he didn't get permission for this! I only knew he wanted to kiss me five seconds ago. What does he think is happening here? What makes him think he can act this way? I shove at his chest to get away and his arms loosen, and he says, "Uh?"

The reach of the interior light can't bend, but a little of its pool illuminates us and I watch Brown's eyes as he comes round. It takes him a couple of seconds, blinking. He let me go straightaway, now his brain has to catch up. I've stepped back.

"What's the matter? Oh, Jesus. You didn't want that. Are you okay?"

He looks regretful that he did that to me - or is he regretful that I did that to him?

"Sorry - please - sorry," he says.

I'm trying to work it out. Why. Was it the words?

Well, shit! Since when were crosswords foreplay? Perhaps since I sat on a couch and he sat at my knee, and wrote in ballpoint on my leg, that's when. An infra-red camera trained on me would have registered lava in my veins. Bo-bo, you wanted. He got it right, because you fucking like him, but it was too soon, and you panicked, that's what happened. You want romance in a tidy, predictable format - not a wildly beautiful boy doing something so unexpected. But - _oh_... his mouth. His tongue. His dick. Felt really, really good.

"Do you want to go back inside?" He's worried.

Actually, I want to stop being so stupid and timid and have you kiss me again.

But, no. "Maybe I should be getting home. What's the time?"

It's five hours since he came to my house and his smile slid over me in more than hello. I've been with him for five hours straight. It's one o'clock in the morning.

"Sure. I'll walk you home."

A ten minute walk and he keeps apologizing, probably for eight minutes. "Sorry, I wrote on your leg. Jesus - your leg! Don't have a heart attack when you see it. It was really, really uncool."

"It's okay. I'm okay."

Falling silent, both of us. Such a lovely night, such a tongue-tied awkward end for two people who know so many words.

At my door he lifts a hand as if to touch me, but drops it again, uncertain.

"Tomorrow? The usual? Hal and Suzy?" Uncertain, yes and indecisive and hesitant.

"Sure. Thanks for taking me along tonight. Thanks for bringing me home," I say.

And the light from the reading lamp is still on in the living room, although we normally turn it off. I go in there and find Renee reclined on the couch, eyes fluttering with sleep even as she lies in wait for me.

"Bo-bo? My love?"

"Hey, Mom. You waited up." I sit down next to her.

"Of course I did. My little girl. My grown-up girl. How was your party?"

"It was good. Fun. I'm tired now, though."

There's no way that's enough information for her, and she definitely wants more. I'm about to suggest we convene over breakfast when -

"_Bo-bo_?" she asks, in a new voice. A voice I don't know.

I turn to see her gaze set fixedly on my leg, from where she's half-lying behind me. Sitting, my hemline has ridden up again.

There, just above my knee, are words, written on me.

_Connection. Rapport. Flushed. Agitated._

I remember saying them. Brown, his back to me, pen-tip like a quill.

But the last thing he has written - I didn't say that.

_I want you want you want you_

I gasp.

Renee's eyes - sharper than a blade, wanting to ascertain. "Who did that? What happened?" she demands, tigress.

"Edward. Nothing happened. Well - he kissed me."

"Did you want him to?"

" - yes."

"You don't sound like you mean it."

"I did want him to. But then I got scared."

"Why? Did he pressure you?"

"No. It just felt too soon. I felt shy."

"Did you tell him to stop? Did he stop?" She'd go to war right now, for me.

"Yes. He was perfect. Lovely."

"You like him."

I'm quiet. Renee doesn't quiz me further, and we sit together, close, each in our own thoughts, but thinking of the other. I have private thoughts of someone else, too.

They linger, when I go to bed. Private thoughts. I want him. I _want_ him.

Sunday I'm barely up, hair hanging dripping over my shoulders from the shower, when Renee pokes her head through my bedroom door.

"Edward's here. Your downfall and your salvation. You want to see him? You want me to sic Hal on him?"

No. He's only come to say, yet again, that he's sorry and he didn't mean it. I _want_ him to have meant it. I'm the one who's sorry. I'm sorry I made him stop.

Yes, I'll see him. Just give me a minute to get undressed. Tell him to leave his clothes in the hall.

I didn't wash my leg. I didn't wash my leg. My back to Mom as I'm picking underwear out of my drawer, so she doesn't know how abject I am. How thrilled I am. How nervous I am as I'm picking out jeans and t-shirt, the slackers uniform. The reserved girl's uniform.

He's hovering in the kitchen.

"Hi. Good morning," I say. "Coffee?" and he's nervous too, so slender, not grown into his height yet. All limbs, like a colt, or a yearling. No, much older - God. Don't think the word stallion. Don't think the _concept_ stallion. Bo-bo, Bo-bo, you offered him a beverage, and he's nodding. Pay attention!

"Thanks. Two sugars."

"You'll get diabetes."

Turn the machine on. Do all the busy barista stuff - pulverize those beans, it's very noisy. It smells good.

Put a mug under the nozzle.

"Bella - "

Nobody in my life has ever called me Bella. He called me that when he kissed me. My kissing name.

Steam the milk. Gently, gently tip the jug and shake the froth into the coffee, creating the perfect leaf pattern. I'm an artist.

And meanwhile, Mom has gracefully disappeared herself, with Hal, off for their daily constitutional. Brown and I are alone.

"Toast?"

"Bella - "

"Waffles? Cereal? Icecream?"

My hands are fluttering because after handing over his caffeine hit I don't know what to do with them. Gravity isn't working.

"Bella, I don't know what to say. I know I upset you. That wasn't my intention. I'm not a predator. Please don't stop meeting me on the beach every day."

Why? I'm not a sparkling conversationalist. I can hardly be brightening up his life. Maybe he's concerned about Suzy. That's it.

I sigh. "Well, personally I don't have OCD but the world might stop turning if the slightest change were effected in the diurnal course of Hal's timetable."

He's with me. "Armageddon," he nods.

"The end of days."

"So - five o'clock, then, as usual?"

"Synchronize watches."

He's relaxed enough to smile over the expanse of counter top between us. "What are you doing between now and then?"

However, I'm not. "Nothing planned, really." Hardly daring to catch his eye, but forcing myself.

"Would you like to come check out the market?"

"Can I bring Hal?"

"Of course. Ah - Last night?"

I swallow. "How's your coffee?"

"Excellent. You could earn a living doing this. Never mind going to university. Open a business."

"I've thought of that. Coffee and house-minding. Modern essentials."

My evasion is so unsubtle. He's not letting go,though. "You don't seem to want to have a deep and meaningful talk about what I did last night, but you haven't thrown anything at me, and this doesn't taste of bitter almonds, so I'm figuring, ah - you want to forget the whole thing happened?"

As if. There's the small matter of my tattooed thigh. _I want you want you want you_. I wish I could just say it back, and we'd be rolling around on the floor right now. But that's not me. I am solidly encased in faux-virginity, an edifice of stone.

Reply, "mumble, can we befriends? ahum ahum, tripovermytongue I'm dissolving Ihavenoearthlyreason not to lean the hell over and taste the flavor of coffeeinyourmouth and suckyourtonguerightintome - "

Except I don't say any of it. I bite my lip and don't reply. Give me a medal - Olympic gold, and watch me do a victory lap. Restraint has a new synonym, and it's spelled i-s-a-b-e-l-l-a and I am its champion. That could just possibly also be the new synonym for cowardice.

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	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

"Well?" Mom says meaningfully, windswept on her return.

"Well?"

"How were things this morning? You know, I'm impressed that Edward turned up to see you. It shows that he's decent. I take it he came around to apologize for his conduct?"

"Yes."

I've dropped to one knee to stick my face in Hal's neck, for a microsecond. It's not as if I'm being affectionate. He just has this nice, soft, fluffy feel, like a fox-fur with a still beating heart. PETA would crucify me for that thought, but while I'm down here Renee should knight me, for services to dog-kind. One of them, anyway. "With the power vested in me, I pronounce thee Sir Bo." I barely hear what she's actually saying over the thrum from his ribcage, but then I realize it's something about "_so_ sexy, writing on your leg like that."

Not going there.

"I'm meeting Edward and Jasper at the market today. Why don't you come too?" instead.

Snorting. "Oh, Bo-bo, I don't think he wants your old _mother_ along!"

She's not old. She was nineteen when I was born, which makes her only thirty-seven now.

"You've still got all your teeth."

"True. Okay, if that's what it takes to fulfill market attendance requirements - let's do it."

Kill a bit of time between now and our ETD. Renee has agreed we'll walk there together but, "I'll probably go off and do my own thing. You know me. I'll find someone to talk to."

Someone to bombard with her personality.

We find the market noisy and colorful, diverse and vibrant. Aromas of exotic cuisines drift by almost visibly. Rainbows abound. One or two Gaia-worshippers here, stalls with wind-chimes and crystals and the unicorn of plenty bestowing harmonious goodwill. Plenty more besides. Someone sells flowers. Someone sells stained glass. Carob treats. Things made of shells and shells made of things.

Brown and Blond are in the chai tent.

"Isabella! Renee! Come to browse at the Marrakesh Bazaar?" Blond smiles, looking impossibly pleased to see us. He really has something going for him, with his social ease, and way of making you feel special. Renee _simpers_. We sit on cushions, Hal left at the post outside, sniffing underneath Suzy's tail. I will never let him nuzzle me again.

Reserved as usual, I mumble a bit in response as the conversation moves easily. My mother gets more out of Brown and Blond than two police officers playing Good Cop Bad Cop would be able to. Their life stories, laid out. She is shameless and guileless, although I know she has an agenda. This is for my benefit. Quizzing Brown so that I know all his stuff - surface stuff though.

"You're studying music? What - in general, or something more specialized?"

"Music theory. So, ah - composition analysis..." trailing off. He thinks if he goes into it either we won't understand him, or we'll be bored. But Renee nods, encouraging. He elaborates, "My major assignment will be a study of structure and themes in the work of Mahler, who was - "

"Oh, Mahler," my mother sighs. "One of so many to be most truly appreciated posthumously. Such a shame, although of course the acclaim as a conductor during his lifetime must have been a salve..."

Brown blinks in surprise, and Blond raises an eyebrow. As for me, I swear, I will never know her. She could tell me she has a pilot's license, or speaks Urdu fluently, and I would say of course. You're Renee. Elusive, mercurial. I love and admire and envy you fiercely, mother.

But she and I are being quizzed, too.

"So, what are your interests? Sports, music, art?" Blond. Only ever Blond.

"No, yes and yes." She laughs at him.

"You're not out there cheering for the Diamonds or the Razorbacks?"

"No. No state fervor whatsoever. Not even patriotic fervor."

Brown calmly watches me shaking my head in affirmation, but Blond is aghast. "We may have to rethink the friendship between the House of Swan and the House of Cullen."

"No we won't. We'll just steer clear of inflammatory topics."

After delicious and decadent tea, and quite an information cache, Renee declares her intention to look for friends. Since she has already made the acquaintance of the entire electoral roll here, it should only take her thirty seconds to run into someone she knows. Off she wanders.

"You want to take a look around?" Brown asks me.

We walk in the sun in the smiles. Me. Brown. Blond. Hal. Suzy. A tight leash for the little wriggly tobiano. My elder statesman the epitome of dignity. We eat gozleme. My thigh is still engraved and I am hyper-aware of the skinny bronze-haired man in ripped jeans walking beside me. Both he and his brother have adjusted their strides because I'm so small in comparison. Remembering last night makes me light-headed, so I wipe it out, for now. It's something for later. We walk in the sun in the smiles.

Away from Renee though, Blond is a little different. Unfocused. He knocks into someone, not watching where he's walking. He doesn't seem in the moment.

"Did you enjoy last night?" I ask him. He might be hungover? Sun too bright?

"Great, yeah. Thanks. Hope you did, too."

No comment.

And then we turn a corner, mooch past another few stalls - organic veges, estate jewelery, and pre-loved children's clothes, and Blond stands stock-still. Ahead of us is a trestle table with leather goods - belts, wallets, sandals. There's a girl sitting there, a punky girl with part of her head shaved and a tattoo showing on her scalp. Piercings adorning one ear. A single silver ring threaded through two tiny holes in the base of her throat - I didn't even know you could get a piercing there. She's starkly beautiful, confrontational. She is sitting in casual chatter with another girl. The other girl is Alisha.

"Uh. Hey," Blond starts, and I swear I can hear his blood quickening.

"Jas!" Alisha exclaims. "Hey! I was just telling Makendra about you!"

Jumping up, with what I may begin to think is her trademark energy. "I _love_ this market. I'm going to get a stall. Mak's told me how to apply. My stuff would go great here."

Blond appears at a loss, but a happy one. "Yeah," he answers.

Alisha skips around the table to us as the girl, Makendra frowns. "I'm _starving_. What's good to eat?" Alisha says.

"Yeah," Blond says again. A grin has taken him over. A light. A fizz of electricity.

Brown nudges me. "There's an off-leash area. Let's take the dogs there." And while Hal doesn't need to run with the wind and splash and tumble in the grass, livewire Suzy does. We leave the newly monosyllabic Blond and the effusive Alisha, and take man's best friends somewhere Suzy can gambol.

She does. Such a sliver, a slither, a quiver - she dashes off to leap around other dogs but returns to Hal in a flash every time, her pink tongue hanging out and dripping. And now that we're on our own together, Brown says sorry yet again for last night.

"You're over-apologizing," I tell him.

"Oh. Okay." A nod. "It won't happen again."

The apology or the act? Silence can be full of unvoiced, unspoken, undelivered words. I have no idea what he's thinking. Not much more of an idea what_ I'm_ thinking. He came over this morning, first thing, hair still wet from his shower. Wanted to meet me at lunchtime, showing me around the market.

"Do you have plans for this evening? You and Renee could come along to the movie at the community centre," he offers now. "They're screening Casablanca."

He wants to see me three times in one day?

"I'll ask her."

There won't be a beach walk this afternoon, I guess, with the dogs getting their fresh air and limb-stretching right now. Suzy comes galloping up and she's rolled joyously in something unidentifiable but disgusting, and Brown grimaces, trying to restrain her. Too late - she's run back to her one true love to show him how clever she is, and the two of them slide over one another, play-biting, play fighting. Hal comes when I call, and he stinks too.

"Well, that makes it bathday," Brown remarks.

We affix their leashes and stroll, not quite leisurely. Our animals are offensive.

Blond and Alisha are browsing someone's pen and ink drawings, swapping opinions, finding one another funny.

"I'm taking Suzy home. Like, _now_," Brown says, to Blond's nod. Blond tells Alisha about the film showing, the weekly cinema set-up.

"Sounds great," Alisha says. "But, you know, I live two hours' drive from here, so that makes it quite a late night for me. Maybe another time, when I can set my Monday up beforehand. Next weekend? I can stay at Makendra's."

And I need to get Hal home and under a jet of water with an application of deodorizing dog shampoo before the stench of him kills me. Where is Renee?

Here she comes. "Oh, Bo-bo, I've just met a fascinating woman. A gallery owner. She's got an opening on next Sunday. Mosaic ornaments. You know I love mosaics. What's that awful smell?"

Brown and I have to get out of there. The fumes.

"Tonight?" he asks, when we reach the end of his street. "It starts at seven. I don't think the movie's that long - maybe an hour and a half. There's the horror film afterwards, if you're up for it. I think they're showing The Shining."

"I don't know." I honestly don't. Is he trying to make things up to me, or does he genuinely want to spend time with me, or is he a desperado who for reasons yet unknown has a shortage of friends? He's intense, sure. Maybe he's too intense and he scares people off.

"Can I let you know?"

Brown goes home, I go home. I get the hose on Hal outside on the grass, and then I soap him up and get my fingers curling into his fur to scrub him and this alarming thing happens - he curls his lip, baring his fangs. The first time he does it I think he's going to bite me. I stop, and he turns those deeply ancient wolf eyes with their worlds of expression to my face, imploring. I have another go at the scalp massage. Hal practically melts. The lip thing, if I attribute human emotions to him, is a smile. An Alsation smiled at me for scratching his back. I'd planned to lather him down and rinse him off and that would be it, but Hal is endearing himself to me. His open enjoyment of my attention is such that I end up giving him a doggy-rub, spending ages. Then the brushing. I might have said one or two admiring things to him about how handsome he is. By the time he's fit to be back inside his dark eyes shine like embers when he looks at me. Maybe we've bonded.

Renee arrives home with a bag of produce and some weird wine, and she's full of wonder and news and gossip.

"This is such an amazing town. I could live here. So different to the city. So different to home, don't you think? Darling, I'm making risotto. Wild mushrooms and thyme, with ingredients from the market. They're so fresh! I like your _friends_."

"Edward invited us a movie tonight."

"Us? You mean you and me?"

Unpack the bag, laying out funghi on the countertop. Porcini, oyster, portobello. Nodding.

"Do you want to go? Oh, you're not sure, are you? You want a bit of distance from last night? Sweetie, if you want to go, _I_ want to go. If you want to stay here,_ I_ want to stay here. Easy as that."

I picture sitting, reclining, lying beside Edward in the dark, flickering beam of the projection overhead. He turns, and leans and no-one else sees his hands on me and his mouth on me, sinking into sensation and whirling into pleasure. No-one else exists under our veil of clandestine touching, just the two of us. I won't find that private fantasy fulfilled in a room in the local community centre. I'll find it tonight in my bed, alone, hands on myself.

"I think he likes you," Renee adds. "Just going on, you know, body language."

Yeah. I got that last night. Body language. Not sure about the _like_ aspect though. God, Isabella, does it matter?

"Oh. I'm kind of tired. A quiet night in?"

"In that case, darling, open that bottle. It's strawberry wine. That's gotta be nice, right?"

Open the wine, leave it to breathe, go to the sofa and the gold late afternoon while my mother cuts and slices things recently alive. I don't have Brown's number, only Blond's. Damn and double damn.

"Hi Jasper. Mom and I won't make the movie tonight. Sorry, Isabella." Text.

About five minutes later my phone beeps. "Hey Bella, sure. See you tomorrow."

Blond doesn't call me Bella, my kissing name. The reply must have been from Brown.

And reliably, tomorrow turns up in the morning. While Renee and Hal are out I peruse recipe books to make nice things for lunch. Cheese souffle with onion marmalade. Put on a cd. Read. Do some laundry. Wipe down the shower cubicle. I start so many things I don't finish any of them, although luckily I don't ruin the lunch.

Renee always pops by the butchers on her early-bird walk so we have a stream of raw meat, sitting in its crimson self-sauce in covered containers in the fridge. We have enough of it to seriously consider a donation to a developing country. Maybe Renee likes the butcher.

"Have you met anyone, Mom?" I say, as she sallies through the door, unclipping Hal's leash, tossing her sunhat like a frisbee.

"What? Who? I've met loads of people."

"I mean, anyone in _particular_."

"I told you - loads of people."

"I'm wondering specifically about the butcher. We have more dead animal than Hal can consume. If you're going to keep going on a daily basis, it's okay to make it a social call."

Finely-plucked eyebrows trying to see what I'm getting at. Then she's laughing. "Oh, darling, it's not _me_ that wants to go there every day. It's Hal - he _drags_ me there. You've never met the butcher, have you? Mr Whatever-his-name-is, he's about ninety, you know. He gives Hal half a dried pig's ear, every day. So revolting. But I gather it's a tradition. I'm not one to buck tradition."

So I'm not going to get a step-father who wields a cleaver. I'm fine with that.

But still, Renee has not gone about the process of procuring a step-father for me with any diligence whatsoever. She's young and pretty, but has appeared disinterested. I never wondered about it when I was younger, but now that I am old enough to feel _urges_, I know that she must feel them too. She's keen enough for me to have a romance - what about _her_ having one?

Maybe desire lessens when you're older. Maybe it's reduced when you have a child. Maybe it's just not a big thing when you're a head-in-the-clouds serial flitter from job to interest to cause to activity.

None of those things apply to me. My desire is steadily on the increase.

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	6. Chapter 6

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

I've been asked to the sports club.

"You up for a squash tournament?" A text from Blond.

"Participating or spectating?"

"Your call."

I wouldn't know how to play squash to save my life. I even have to google it, to work out what it's all about. Something to do with running around really fast in a confined space, hitting a ball and grunting.

"What time?"

"We'll come by at 10. Wear rubber-soled shoes. No jeans."

Of course, I won't play. Sports has always been a no-go zone for me. I don't think I breathe right. I have some kind of deficit, and then there's the wonky limbs.

Renee is amused, knowing all about the deficit, as it comes from her side. She has never been forthcoming about the other side, but if there's sporting ability there it's latent.

"Oh, me and Hal will just go for our daily ramble - you go off and have fun with _Edward_."

"I don't know if he's going to be there."

"The word '_tournament_' was used, wasn't it? That implies it's more than Jasper by himself, hoping you'll join him in a rally."

"Maybe."

But yes, Brown comes to my door as well, and he's withdrawn. Things are different. Blond is edgy and restless, and favors me with warmth, but his smiles are miles away. He is here and so elsewhere. I feel the weight of glances from Brown, but when my gaze catches him, he's watching the footpath for cracks, or scanning the far horizon. Something's up with both of them. What?

"Bear's coming. He always wins," Blond remarks, on the way to the club.

"What about Gypsy?"

"No, she's working. You were thinking of playing mixed doubles? That'll still work. I can partner you, and Bear will partner Edwina. There's got to be some sort of handicap for him."

I'd forgotten how huge Bear is. If you're not carrying round the Guinness Book of World Records, you might not remember that there are actual giants.

"Suzy's friend!" he greets me, wrapping my hands in his.

And so it's singles first, and it's Bear versus Brown.

"Look away if you're sensitive," Blond warns. "This will be slaughter. Bear is the fittest guy I've ever met."

While the nuances of squash may escape me, the lightning speed and the crack and thump of the ball can be followed even by the most amateur of viewers. Brown is very fast, but Bear is a blur. The two of them come off sweaty and daubing themselves with towels, Bear the victor.

"Give me a minute, Jasper, then I'll thrash you," he pants. "Isabella - you challenging Edward? He's no competition - he has a wooden eye."

"Really, I'm okay with just being the commentator."

Blond. "You were commentating?"

"I said 'Blur'."

Brown throws water down his throat, angling his head back, hair dampened and stuck to his head, Adam's apple bobbing as he swallows. Don't look. Stay on the safe side - if there _is_ a safe side.

"Do you know the rules?" he asks.

No, I don't. I can set them, though.

Oh, squash.

Bear versus Blond, with Brown and me high up in the little grandstand. Please, please, stop being so nervous - him, not me. I feel fine. _Fine_.

But the silence stretches, though the place is really rowdy, constant smack of the balls against walls, the thud of the rackets, the pounding of feet and the grunting.

"You managed to get Hal cleaned up after the unfortunate stink incident?" eventually.

"Yes, I had to shampoo him three times. I had to hold my breath."

"That's a lot of breath-holding."

"It was a lot of stink."

I don't know how you score squash, but apparently Bear is winning again. Thwack. Blond is fast and accurate and forceful, and Bear is all that and more. Time's up and they climb the stairs, flushed.

"You should get off the fucking steroids, man. You know about the side effects," Blond warns Bear.

"No problems in that department, friend. No complaints, either. See how happy Gypsy always looks?"

Brown goes off to the kiosk to get electrolyte drinks for all, and Blond goes to the bathroom.

"So what work does Gypsy do?" I ask big Bear.

"Oh, she's in a car yard. Kind of an internship thing while she studies."

"She sells cars?"

That sunny personality, clinching deals... hard to imagine. Hope she's on a retainer, and not paid by commission.

"Nope. Works on 'em. My beautiful grease-monkey. She just loves engines - knows 'em inside and out. You look surprised."

You could say that. Overalls, golden hair scrunched back, alabaster complexion smudged... Give me a minute.

"Why's she called Gypsy?"

"Her name's Rosalie. You know - Gypsy Rose Lee."

Makes sense. "Why don't Edward and Jasper have nicknames?"

He chortles. "Are you kidding me? They've already got the stupidest names I ever heard. I could never come up with anything more fitting or more laughable._ Jaasssperrr_... _Eeedwaarrrd_... How mincing and poncey can you get? Go Esme, that's all I can say."

Bear is amusing himself, and he's funny, although I don't think the Cullen brothers' names are quite as deserving of ridicule as he does. I like them. The _names_.

Blond and Brown reappear, and Bear challenges me to a match. More of his humor, I hope, because I wouldn't know one end of a racquet from the other. Each looks equally hard to hit the ball with.

"Uh," I hesitate, but he's having none of it. The court is still booked, he has energy to spare and Blond and Brown are shrugging expressively.

Into the little cubicle, and I can't play for peanuts. As it turns out, now Bear can't play for peanuts either. He fluffs every single shot. He curses and lunges and misses, and takes great swipes that cleave the air, his flourishes spinning him in centrifugal force that crashes him to the ground. Swoop, dive, miss, roll, swipe, miss. Moving five hundred percent more than I am.

Somehow I score points, because occasionally the ball and the oval-framed catgut or whatever it is that I am wielding intersect, and the ball hits above the line. Bear theatrical, blaspheming and verging on weeping. His effortless skill disappeared, movements too slow and too wrong.

"Jesus - did you see that? Bells On Fire - she fucking slaughtered me. I never stood a chance. You set me up, all of you. Jesus, the humiliation. Bells On Fire, you're stunning, pretending you didn't know how to play. Boys, you're _losers_, it's official. As well as being tools."

And so I've gained a name.

We're in the cafe having grilled tunafish and cheese sandwiches, and Bear keeps calling me Bells On Fire.

"You only won because I was already worn out, you know," he says. "I think I deserve the right to request a re-match. Soon."

"Set the date," I say, laughing. Can't help liking such an upfront, open character.

Relate the whole thing to Renee and she's laughing too.

"Oh, and Bells On Fire, Alisha has invited us to visit her this week, for lunch. What do you think?"

"Great."

I wonder if I can mention this to my _friends_ or not.

"Might not be around tomorrow," I offer casually, afternoon, on the sand. "We're going to see Alisha."

Blond lights up like an incandescent bulb.

"Tell her hello from me." Faux casual. Tentative and crackling like static. Oh, God - I thought _I_ had a crush - Blond is on fire. I feel for him. I catch the spark and I _feel_. I'll tell her all right, and I'll measure her response and if she shows a tenth of what I've just seen in him I'll report it gladly.

So Renee and I drive on up the coast again - sparkling sea and sky to one side of us, and cliffs to the other, clad with trees horizontally-rooted, clinging in desperation to earth tilted the wrong way, still reaching skywards.

Alisha is a carnival of color and sound, movements so quick, speech flitting to keep up with thoughts tangential.

"I do my own felting. Look at these shoulderbags. Oh, I design loads of yardage - you want curtains?" she asks. Her studio a cornucopia. We touch things, Renee and me, in our kinesthetic way. The artist approves of tactile explorers, smiling as our fingers trail.

"Lunch?"

She arrays things - olives, pastrami, hummous, pickled this, roasted that, sundried the other, turkish bread and goji juice.

"Mint tea?" in morroccan glasses.

Renee is getting a run for her money, because Alisha can talk. She's up there with the very best - and it's not nonsense, she's captivating.

"Oh, I have an opinion on almost everything. I'm willing to change it if someone comes up with a counterpoint that's considered and compelling... "

"Jasper asked me to say hello to you."

The briefest pause. "Oh, Jasper. He's gorgeous. Interesting, too. Too young for me, of course, but what a lovely guy."

Apparently Alisha is in her late twenties. Apparently, she's dismissing Blond. What on earth am I going to tell him?

"And he has that cute puppy. I saw her at the market. She's a little beauty, isn't she?"

This brings the talk around to dogs, and Renee mentions Hal and his popularity, Hal and Suzy's love-of-the-century crush on one another, Hal and the butcher - the mountains of meat in our fridge.

"Hey - it's obvious, isn't it?" Alisha exclaims."Of course!"

What's obvious?

"They should get married, straight away. A doggy wedding. We can invite all their friends - we'll do all the catering, I'll make the costumes, I'll organise the whole thing. Pippa will love it."

"You know Pippa?" Renee asks.

"Oh, yeah. I've lived around here a while. I know Pippa."

"But when will this wedding be? If we're going to marry her dog off, don't you think we should wait until she gets back?" I ask.

"No. Because there's no time like the present. If we wait for her to get back, you two will be gone. We'll host it in your backyard, we'll put a laptop outside and film the whole thing, and Pip can be part of it real time, or she can watch whenever. You'll end up having to throw all that meat out, otherwise. And then the happy couple can get get - you know - happy."

"They're both de-sexed," I say.

"I'm de-sexed and I can still get happy." An appropriate response for that comment eludes me and I just blink.

"You really want to do this? Pooch matrimonials?" Renee asks, no doubt imagining herself the matron of honor, presiding over a hairy gathering of mutts and mongrels, with the odd Bichon-friese, or Rhodesian ridgeback. Personally, I'm thinking that someone will have to do the lawn sweep afterwards. Yuck - not me. Perhaps that is a job we could outsource?

"Oh, absolutely. Event planning is my thing. Or it was - that's what I went to college for. It just turned out once I got there I was already on top of anything they could teach me. So I switched to design. Yadda, yadda. Anyway - the guest list. Isabelle - can you get me a list of their friends?"

She's a whirlwind driving a bulldozer. No is not an option. Thinking quickly.

"I haven't really been around here long enough. Probably Jasper's going to be the best person to ask about that."

"Okay - what's his number? I'll give him a call. Oh, look, I'm coming down this weekend anyway, for the market. Tell him to come and meet me."

This is me speaking to Blond. _Oh yes - Alisha. She thinks you're gorgeous and lovely. She doesn't need to use birth control. She'd like to see you on Sunday._

Or the other response. _Alisha - she said you're too young for her, but she likes your dog. She doesn't want your number. Can you drop round to her market stall and tell her who Suzy's puppy pals are?_

We're not back until after 7, my mother and me, and housebound Hal is hankering for the beach. He takes off down the path. I'm hankering too, and to my surprise, there they are. Blond, Brown and Suzy. Hours after they normally walk.

"Thought we'd come out later," Blond shrugs.

Glad you did, so glad. Brown falling into step easily beside me, although he doesn't really say anything.

"Had a good day?" Blond. "How was your lunch?"

"Great. Really nice. Yeah."

He's not asking about lunch.

Having thought this through on the way home, I give a watered-down version of what Alisha said. Don't want to mislead, don't want to hurt. Walking a thin line, like a high wire stretched across the Niagara Falls of Blond's feelings.

"Alisha has come up with a plan to marry Hal and Suzy to each other. She wants to talk to you about it Sunday. She asked me to tell you to look for her at the market."

"She wants to talk to us?" Blond asks, pointing his thumb to Brown, then back to himself.

"No. You."

He looks away, but I've seen the quick reaction. Hope and triumph - he's so fucking pleased. How old are you, Blond? You're not too young. You're the older brother. Brown has to be around twenty. You have to be around twenty-two or so. What's six or seven years? I don't know what he wants, anyway. Alisha's pert little body and her motormouth and her talent, and the sass and sway, and the unexpectedness of her. We're not talking anything lifelong, are we? He wants an experience. What does she want? He's not too young.

"A dog's wedding," Brown grins. "Mad."

And I count his smiles. I evaluate his expressions. Since the weekend, I'm so nervous around him, and trying so damn hard to act like I'm not.

"Isabella, the food festival starts on Saturday. You want to meet for tapas?"

Always from Blond, the invitations.

"Sounds good."

"The dog race is this weekend too. Maybe Hal could be up on the dais or something, when the winner gets the blue ribbon. Hal's already a champion. It's not like he needs to prove anything. He doesn't have to run."

"How do they get the dogs to race?"

"They don't really. There's a meeting point, and you register, and then someone runs off shouting "here, doggy, doggy" and goes for a couple of blocks, and most of the entrants just watch him go. It's really only the younger dogs that think it's a game and try and follow. Any animal that makes it to the finish line gets a ribbon, and any animal that's shown up at all gets some sort of canine chocolate treat. The winner gets a cup with their name engraved on it that they hand over the next year. I have very high hopes for Suzy, I'll tell you now. I've been training her."

"Sad, but true," Brown nods.

"Sounds like compulsory viewing, then," I say. "I'll be there, cheering."

We walk on, Blond chats, Brown picks up smooth stones and throws them in to the water, and the evening lengthens to a close. We leave shadows behind us and footprints in the sand; we leave on the sunset world marks that won't outlast our passing.

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	7. Chapter 7

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

The week proceeds, and I proceed, and Renee proceeds, and God it's a procession toward Alisha, I think. The boys and I have sandcastle afternoons. I draw a mermaid and find shells to adorn her, collecting strings of sea-bubble fronds for her hair and wanting pearls for her eyes though this beach surrenders no such treasures.

Blond is barely contained and can't settle.

Brown has the patience of Job or the patience of a knight, or the patience of something. My princess of the sea's tail lies sketched in outline before him, and he kneels to draw in scales. Painstaking and precise, he renders each curve gently pointed, like the bottom of a loveheart. All interlocking.

Then Suzy lollops right across it, kicking up sand, ruining Brown's labor. You can't be annoyed, because she's adorable, and because it's not an enduring medium anyway.

"Ca fait rien," Brown shrugs, which I remember from somewhere. Maybe a movie I watched with Renee.

Nearby, Blond has made a fort with a moat and a bridge and turrets. How boy. Don't quite know why Brown didn't go so boy too.

"Imposing," I tell Blond. "Convoluted. Impenetrable. Except by sea."

That's enough for him, and he's off, leaving his construction so he can dance in the swirls that lap to his ankles, teasing Suzy, making her bark and yelp as he kicks spray arcing to her for her to catch in her mouth.

And Renee. Our evenings are so - nice. A tepid word, but apt here. Open and unguarded, casual and easy, lounging around, the two of us. She thinks I have surging hormones and I want _Edward_, and she's right, but I want to be with her, and I love our us. Hal gently snoozes on the floor, Mom and I enjoy crackers and dips, movies, and the slow discovery of who she is and who I am. I don't how we missed out on that, living in the same house for the last forever, but external focus has had us both in a grip we didn't seek to challenge. Now we're here, it's hello, you're Renee; I'm Isabella. Coffee? Tea? Taramasalata?

"Bo-bo, you know there's some sort of food gala on this weekend?"

"Yes, Jasper mentioned it."

"Jasper? He's the one who asked you to the party, isn't he? And the one who asked you to squash?"

Translating Renee-speak - what's going on?

"Edward kissed you, but Jasper is the one inviting you everywhere. This isn't going to be like Farinelli, is it?"

We watch Farinelli. I could weep for the boy - I do. For what he gained and what he lost. Adoration was his, and women flocked to him for the soaring splendor of his throat. What happened once they got there? How was his performance offstage, in the bedroom? Could he do anything? Did he even want to?

I don't want to discuss this with Renee. Don't want to discuss sex. She gave me the lowdown, years and years ago, when I was three or four, explaining matter-of-factly the penis goes in the vagina. The what goes in the what? That little thingie I've seen when boys pull down their pants to peepee goes _where_? No! I don't have one of those jabina-parts, mommy. And boys can't _do_ that. And _I_ never will.

That all changed, of course. The peepee thingie and the jabina have had meetings. But I don't want to talk about sex with Renee. Neither having already had it, or being possibly contemplating having it. With a near neighbor. On vacation.

"So..." Renee says musingly, as I baulk, and a question concerning _Edward_ is surely coming. Stand up and rinse my glass. Tonight we tried Martini Rosso. Liked it so much that if my tongue was long enough I'd lick the glass clean instead of putting it under the faucet. La la la, can't hear you mother.

"About your _friends_..."

La la la.

"I don't know," I reply quickly.

"Oh, I'm sure you do," she smiles, and leaves it at that. I know what? Precisely nothing.

And for a bit variation, a couple of afternoons my _friends_ and I take Hal and Suzy to the woods behind the house. It's warm everywhere here, this summer town, but under the foliage is a cooler world, damp and trickling. A stream offers mossy stones, and undergrowth is ferny. Quieter than the beach, though with whispers from shifting leaves, and the trampling panting of the dogs.

Blond asks artlessly, "How are the wedding plans going? When is it going to be? As the father of the bride, I need to know these things."

"Funny, I always thought you were a _son_ of a bitch," Brown snickers, earning a shoulder punch.

"Soon," I say.

"Soon? Why? Is Suzy knocked up? Do I need my shotgun?"

Then Blond stops pretending he wants to talk about the wedding.

"Maybe I should send Alisha a photo of Suzy. It might help. Do you have an email address for her?"

"Sorry, no. You could try looking at the Queen Mab website..."

"There's no contact option on it."

Brown and I exchange a glance, his eyebrows almost up to his hairline in surprise.

"Shut the _fuck up_," Blond tells him, and then he's off running between trees, calling the affianced Suzy.

"Training time!" he yells, and they're lost from sight.

"Well," Brown says - a sentence on its own.

"Well," I say back.

Blond has already tried to track Alisha down. Well.

And Renee informs me, courtesy of her direct line to the grape vine via the butcher Mr Ninety, that Hal's presence is required at the dais on Saturday, when the canine sprinting champion is presented with the winner's cup and its accompanying accolades.

"Fitting, don't you agree?" she says, as somehow, the wobbly old mutt has found his way into her affections as well as mine, and she is very, very proud at this honor bestowed upon him. Our Hal is going to be wearing a blue satin ribbon signifying his elevated status amongst the town's dogdom, and apparently his name has been stitched on it in gold.

"We must send photos to Pippa."

The interwebs are lately quite clogged with the photos we send to Pippa - Hal on the beach, Hal on the deck, Hal in his basket, Hal asleep, Hal awake. Hal's pretty girlfriend.

"What does Pip think about Suzy?" I ask.

"She wants to know if she's well-mannered and comes from a good family."

"Well, the second is a yes - as to the first, she can be impatient and she always wants to be the centre of attention. And she bolts her food."

"She's young yet - still adolescent, really."

"She's certainly very pretty, and she has a sweet nature."

"That's enough to base a marriage on, isn't it?"

My mother has never been married, so she's no expert. Why consult her?

We wander into town and it's teeming with people and atmosphere and goodwill and music.

Blond texts. _Dolmades! Haloumi!_

Everything is so crowded I have no idea where he is.

_Edamame! Tempura!_

"Okay - the food area is sectioned off, and I'm guessing we can't take Hal in there. I'll hang onto him and wander around on the periphery and see if I run into anyone, and you and I can catch up again in an hour or two, shall we Bo-Bo?"

"Ok, Mom, sure."

_Clotted cream fudge! I have DIED!_

Streets closed off, tables everywhere - chairs, benches, umbrellas. I scan through the tops of heads, looking for Blond's streaky, dusty mop, and Brown's wayward, messy locks. Taller than most people, these two, I see their hair before I see them.

They're in Scotland.

"Have you heard of skirlie? Try it! Oh, and hello," Blond pushes a paper plate at me, with a fork and something that looks like cereal and onions. It's good.

"Fudge," he says, another plate, a little toffee-colored lump sitting on it. Sickly sweet, but a treat in such a small amount.

Hands me a tiny plastic cup containing an elixir.

"Mead. Go easy. It's fifty percent honey, five hundred percent alcohol," he warns.

Holy smoke. It's fiery and smooth and burns and soothes. It's wicked and heavenly. Monks communed with God on a bellyful of it, and newlyweds lived on nothing but this and sex for a month following their nuptials. It's so startling and golden and enlivening and pleasurable it tints my cheeks. I feel warm all over, and suspect the blush may have spread. Must have spread. Brown is looking at my throat.

"So, just for today, this is sort of our Medina," Blond smiles. "Let's take a stroll. My arm, mademoiselle? Where to next?"

I don't get it, I really don't. He's light-hearted, flippant, and not really flirting, but Brown scowls and I see him kick his brother in the ankle.

"Fucking lay off, Jas," he growls quietly, and Blond shrugs and withdraws the proffered arm.

"You know to just ignore him, don't you?" Brown says to me, Blond shrugging.

We part company, Brown and me veering off, Blond not there the next time I look around for him.

"So what's your favorite cuisine?" Brown asks me.

"Can I have more than one?"

"The word favorite would indicate a response in the singular."

"No favorite then. Thai, Japanese, Greek - "

"Ever eaten North African?"

"No."

Him and me. Alone together in this surging, chattersome, noiseful congregation.

A stall brightly bannered Eritrea serves pancakes, and dishes of meat cooked with different spices. I remember a bumper sticker I saw once: _Lips that touch meat will never touch mine_. Call me an optimist. Call me a fool. I don't want to sample it.

"_You_ wouldn't eat this stuff," I say to him and he smiles.

"On the contrary - they have beans."

We slowly wend our way around, drinking rose lassi as we go. Brown knows everyone, and I am recognized and warmly greeted as one of Hal's humans. Out in the non-food area we relieve Renee, take Hal's leash, and look at art.

"Does your town ever throw off this mantle of culture and just become ordinary?" I ask Brown.

He grins. "For forty-six weeks a year this town is as ordinary as it gets. You just happened to be here for the season it pulls out its own particular kind of special."

I'm not grinning. He's in a light grey t-shirt with an unbuttoned blue shirt over it. He is unshaven and his hair is as rumpled as his clothes. He looks like he came straight from bed to be here. He looks too good to be out in public.

"You want to check out the entrants for the big race?" he's asking, while I blink and clear my throat to get back to the moment. Back to reality. For a minute there I was just gazing wordlessly at where the column of his throat meets his collarbones. The t-shirt is so tatty the neck is stretched and some of the stitching is undone. Um. You were saying?

"They should be assembling by now."

Who should be what? Oh, the race. "Yes. Is it okay to take H-a-l?"

"Of course. He's the model of decorum. The youngsters will be going a bit mental with excitement but dogs are very hierarchical. They'll recognize his authority."

Not hard to find fifty dogs really - you just follow the noise. Yelps, whines, whimpers and more of the same. What's the collective noun for these animals? Can't just be a pack, that's not sufficiently descriptive.

"A bark of dogs," Brown says, as though he's reading my thoughts.

"A wag of dogs."

"A sniff of dogs."

"A slavering of dogs."

"Yuck," he grimaces. "You win. For coming out with a conversation stopper."

"It's a gift," I admit, happy enough.

Esme is in the melee, looking like she wishes she wasn't, holding on to Suzy. Suzy looks like she has rabies. Foaming at the mouth and so hysterical her eyes are showing their whites. The butcher is walking around with a clipboard and a pen, marking names off and handing out tags to be attached to collars. Not that identification is needed, surely. None of these animals resemble any others.

Out of nowhere, Blond is beside us, offering us a list with all the contestants' names. Quick perusal. Their types are there as well.

"What's a spoodle?" I ask.

"See that sandy-colored fluffy thing over there? She's a spaniel-poodle cross."

"Ok. Who and what is Spanky the spug?"

"That reddish little tubby one with the squashed nose and curly tail. A spaniel-pug."

Erk. Surely that wasn't an authorized pairing.

But now it's time for us to proceed to the winner's podium so that Hal won't try to start running once the whole thing starts. Not that he would, anyway, because he always walks to heel. I feel the warm pressure of his side against my leg as we make our way, and when we stand, because in his old age he is not as steady as he used to be, and he tends to lean. I don't mind, though he's heavy.

"Shall we leave the youngsters to their fun, and go and sit down like grownups, matey?" I say softly, rubbing him behind the ears, and looking back up to see that Brown has heard me.

Off to the finish line we go, and so we don't see the race at all, we just hear it as we wait in the square. Hal dozing idly under the dappled shadows of leaves, Brown and Blond muttering anxiously about Suzy. Confident of his training techniques, Blond placed a bet.

"Loser," Brown murmurs.

"Ye of little faith."

"You'll see."

A bunch of stragglers appear around the corner, on the home stretch, following Bear who has been dubbed "Hare" for the event. Fittest man ever, he could outrun a greyhound. He is outrunning a bark, a wag, a sniff, a slavering of dogs. Actually, some are following, some are bounding ahead aimlessly, some simply turn the corner and make for whatever catches their eye. Nowhere near even half of the entrants have made it this far. We can't see Suzy who is MIA.

First past the post is a tall, bristly something-or-other. Surprisingly, the dog with the shortest legs and the stupidest name is the runner-up. Spanky the second. Third is - I don't know. Blond has gone looking for Suzy, and Esme and Renee have gone looking for wine and I want to look for somewhere quieter. We wade through the formalities, the presentation, the awards ceremony.

"Don't know about you, but dog races make me tired and thirsty," Brown says. "There's a beer tent. Jas will find us, Hal can sit at the entrance and we can be right next to him."

"They won't serve me," I point out.

"They will," he answers. "You're with Hal."

And everyone finds everyone eventually, and I fall into quietude as Blond tells stories, Brown snorts and rolls his eyes, and our mothers bond over homewares.

"Have you seen those new wineglasses that have no stems?"

"Mattress toppers that are three inches deep?"

I have no part in this. Instead:

"Where did Suzy come in the final countdown?"

Blond. "Ahem. Somewhere in the third quartile. She's still a puppy."

Brown snorts. "I blame the trainer."

An hour later, when I peel Renee off Esme - I swear they both lose hair. It's like a waxing.

Roll and tumble home. How disgraceful. It's only eight o'clock and my mother and I are tipsy.

"Herzog!" she cries. "Fitzcarraldo!"

Our stalwart Fitzharaldo has seen us home, and could no doubt see us over a mountain. I give him a bit of a cuddle, with his wise old eyes and his grizzled old muzzle. After today, I suspect most dogs have ADHD, not knowing when to pull their tongues back in, or when to stop running in circles, but not our steady and calm companion. He gives me a affectionate little nuzzle, gazing up with his jersey-cow eyes to ask if he might lie on my feet. Of course, but he's so bony and stringy in his advanced years it's not comfortable. I cross my legs on the floor with him draped over me, and my hands in the ruff of his neck - his lion's mane.

He's a fine fellow, snuffling as we watch.

"So, what were your _friends_ doing tonight?" Renee asks, inattentive to Klaus Kinski. "Where are they? Why are you home?"

I don't know. I don't know.

.

.

.


	8. Chapter 8

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

Morning.

"Bo-bo!" Renee calls. "Come on, sleepy-head!" and the reading on the clock is eight. Fair enough, I suppose.

"Wheatgerm for cleansing, cucumber for alkaline balance," my mother adds as I wander out, her voice almost drowned by the food processor.

"Is this to drink or to put on my face?"

"Oh, you are _funny,_ sweetheart. Sometimes I forget. It's good that you remind me."

None the wiser.

"The fiber will clean your intestinal tract, and the cucumber will give you energy and promote clear skin."

Still unsure whether it's for external or internal application. "Why is it such a weird color?"

"Oh, I've put yellow raspberries in it as well. It's delicious."

To be eaten, then.

Intestinal tract presumably sparkling, I read on the deck, under the blue blue, shaded by the umbrella while Renee takes Hal for their stroll. Their constitutional. Their promenade.

She wants to do things to my hair when she get back.

"Oh, Bo-bo, the salt. Your hair is so sticky and heavy. I can do something really ornamental with it, and your usual wispy bits won't come out. This is great."

It might be. She weaves complicated whirls and whorls, and the dampness of sea air has given me extra curl. The damp fights with weight, and I have ringlets here and there - helixes amidst straighter locks.

"Put a nice top on, Bo-bo. Not one of your scungey old t-shirts."

What's nice? I dig out an actual blouse, with darts that shape it, and stick with my skinny jeans underneath. And sneakers.

"You'll do," Renee says, misty-eyed. Fond mother, and-or reliving her glory days. She's not that far out of them.

Market day, and she has been chatting during the week with Alisha, who's booked a stall. Alisha's bringing beadwork. Bags, purses, belts and jewellery. Little does she know it, she's bringing Blond, too, by her very presence. I haven't mentioned this to Mom. Renee and I are arm in arm, almost skipping, Hal trying to trot. She will see her new coterie, the Cerberus that is Renee, Esme and Alisha. I might duck and run.

Busy and bustling, the park where the market sets up. Blond has already asked me to meet him at the secondhand bookstall, and I find him leafing through a yellowed, mottled volume on military insignia.

"If you won a medal, what would it be for?" he asks me.

I think. Not valor. Not presence of mind. Not much.

"Loyalty."

Oh, that was a good answer, if his smile is anything to go by. Smiles bestowed are treasures in themselves; a look of regard from someone beautiful is a moment to capture and hold. Brown may be gorgeous, and any random panel of women with eyes in their heads would vote unanimously that he is, but he doesn't leave his brother behind. I bask. Blond speaks.

"Are you much of a reader?" Then, "What a stupid question. Of course you are." Then, "There's a book here that Alisha might like. What do you think? Why don't you get it for her?"

Why don't _I?_ Why don't _you?_

_"_How about we go halves?" he adds immediately.

It's bargello. Stitchwork that makes designs look three-dimensional. Wave patterns in graduated colors. Cushion covers, geometric flames. He's chosen well and I agree - I think she'll like it.

"Yes."

The girl on the stall would give him this book for a kiss, I can see it, but she charges the five dollars written in pencil inside the front cover. Blond smiles at me again and I would pay ten just for that. I smile back. I don't know where Brown is, but I'm not going to diminish my time with Blond by making him feel I'd rather be with someone else. Even if_ he's_ thinking of someone else.

"Yesterday was great. How's Suzy today?"

"Oh, top of the morning. She's irrepressible. She'll never be a racer, but I'm working on a new regime, and I'm adjusting my expectations. I'm so proud of her. She never even arrived at the finish line, you know. She's color-blind."

"The finish line had a color?"

"Nah." Shrugs. He loves her, and he really _is_ proud. "You want to look around some?"

Wandering isn't in the least aimless. Ahead we go and go, until a T-intersection in front of us shows two trestle tables. The startling steam-punk Makendra in a biker's jacket and a tutu. Alisha, like spring, a gentle brightness of blue and green and yellow.

"Isabelle! Jasper!"

Fancy seeing you here. The blush sits high on Blond's pale cheeks, and he is rendered even more attractive. It looks like a sex flush. It's unmissable.

"Bo-bo - just look what I found!" Mom says. Leads me outside, round the side of the house to a little door there, opening to underneath.

"Where are you taking me? Middle Earth?"

"Look!"

Her discovery doesn't warrant this excitement. It's boxes of empty bottles and jars.

"Uh - very nice, Mom. I guess."

"Come on, Bo-bo - you know all that fruit I've bought - I'm going to make preserves!"

I have no idea what's come over her, unless it's too much sun.

"Do you have sunstroke? Do you need to rest?"

She's not like this at home. Staid and tired and, "Oh God, who wants to cook? Let's get take out, shall we?" There we don't even have a blender, but now her culinary concoctions have expanded to a timeslot more than pre-breakfast and they're threatening to take over the house and the day. I come home in the afternoons to find her elbow deep in pots, one of Macbeth's witches, stirring miscellaneous bubbling liquids.

"I'm making sauce."

"What kind of sauce?"

"Try it and see." Holds out a wooden spatula, gleaming and sticky with yellow, so the "sauce" must be raspberry. She brought home thirteen million punnets of them last Sunday.

Stick my tongue out gingerly, wanting neither to be burned nor poisoned.

"Interesting," I say, truthfully.

"Fruit mustard!" Triumphant declaration.

Mr Ninety is the recipient of her home-styled haute cuisine. She starts taking him a couple of jars a day - fig, walnut, aubergine, pear ... nothing is safe from her knife and immersion in the sauce pot.

Alisha is clearly delighted to see Blond. Makendra, not so much. Our arrival has interrupted Alisha drawing on the side of Makendra's head. What I had thought was a tattoo was a picture in makeup pencil, not ink. Impermanent. Now she's getting a new one.

"But hey - where's the blushing bride?" Alisha asks quickly, noting the lack of a leash in Blond's hand, and the lack of a Suzy at his calves.

He does his best not to look crestfallen, and answers, "Oh, she's with Edward. They'll be along any minute."

Clearly, though only to me, he has engineered to meet Alisha without Suzy being present so that Alisha won't immediately focus on the dog. Oh, Blond. His competition for Alisha's attention is knee-high and sprays saliva when she moves her head too quickly. There's competition from another quarter, too.

"Ally, my head please," pouts Makendra.

Me, "Mr Ninety wants to adopt my mother."

Brown, "Who's Mr Ninety?"

Me: "Purveyor of fine meats. Some of them obscure."

I have discovered, courtesy of a sign in his window, that Mr Ninety can source crocodile and kangaroo, given notice. Both justified and ancient, and not to be _eaten_. No. Renee, tell him you'll discontinue the weird sauces until he discontinues prehistoric reptiles and cuddly marsupials.

A smile tugs at Brown's mouth. "Oh. You mean John Bannerman. My family all call him Ban."

It takes me a moment. "Ban the butcher?"

"Our little joke."

And as we stroll, Renee says, "Now remember, Bo-bo, I'm going to the opening of that mosaic exhibition up the coast I was telling you about. I'll be away overnight, and I'll see you for lunch. You can take care of Hal's morning walk tomorrow, and I'll do the afternoon one. Okay?"

Overnight? Oh. Well, that's nothing to worry about, since I've got a guard-dog. And the crime rate around here is surely zero. I haven't even laid eyes on a cop since we've been here. But overnight, on my own, in the beach-house?

"I'm curious. What's Alisha's place like?" Brown says. Blond is with Alisha and the sullen Mak; Renee and Hal found Esme at the herb stall and I fear my mother will bring home purple basil, and Brown found me. Have I been this close to his eyes before? Not in daylight. Were they this green before? Not in the dark.

"An explosion in a paint factory."

"Of course," he laughs. "So, tell me something else."

"Like what?" I reply, trying not to fluster.

"Anything." It's a gambit.

"The rain in Spain stays mainly in Pamplona," I say.

"Is that true?"

"Probably not."

Pause. "Well, pertinently, I can segue into acknowledging your reference to My Fair Lady, which leads me to mention that the movie showing tonight at Classic Theatre in the Community Centre is Breakfast at Tiffany's. Are you up for it?"

Normally, all offers, suggestions, invitations are extended by Blond, but Blond is so occupied I wouldn't be surprised if he's forgotten what day it is.

"Sounds good." Not just good. Brown has asked me somewhere. Is that the same as asking me out? He said it casually, almost incidentally, and I sort of led him into it, albeit unknowingly. It's not a date. Not anywhere near a date. Not a date.

"Did you say there's always a horror on afterwards?"

"Yeah. You up for that too?"

"I guess." Pause. "Will it be scary?"

"Very."

Pause. Unspoken - will you hold my hand?

"Are you a viewer of a sensitive nature? Don't worry, I'll tell you when to cover your eyes," he says. "You'll be safe with me."

Oh, I already know I won't.

Renee and I wander along home and relax a bit. She heats spinach, mustard and riesling soup, serving it with dry toasted bread dipped in olive oil. Two weeks ago she would have been happy with something out of a can. That blender has given her a new lease of life.

"Love you, Bo, see you tomorrow," she sings, wanting to make the opening by five, waving from the driver's side window. Wine and cheese and grouted chipped china await.

Whispers, the swish of fabric movements and the occasional throat clearing accompany the movie, but this isn't a cinema where you can buy the sort of packaged snacks you find in supermarket aisles, so we all watch in relative peace. Brown and I claim a couch and he reclines with his legs stretched out - so long they could have formed a bridge across the moon river, as I sit with my feet tucked under me. Someone else occupies the other end of the couch and I have to squish up. Part of my thigh is across part of Brown's. Neither of us comment, though it burns a hole through my jeans.

During the credits I'm wracking my brain for a comment that's not facile, when my mouth simply opens: "What's a huckleberry friend?"

He considers. "I don't know. What's a moon river?"

"Whatever it is, how can you be crossing it, and going the same way?"

The lights come up. About fifty people are scattered in the room - on chairs, on the floor. Couples, singles, groups. Alisha and Blond, heads together. He's making her laugh.

"Figure of speech."

"Poetic license."

You are allowed to eat during the interval, but not during the screenings. People stretch and blink, and make for the food counter.

"Peckish?" Brown asks me. "Ginger loaf?"

This place is alcohol-free, which doesn't matter to me as there was a generous half bottle of wine already in Renee's soup. I could eat, though.

"Do you recommend it?"

"Highly."

"Okay, then sure."

Three slices on the plate when he comes back.

"One each, and we share the third or I fight you for it." I'm not going to fight. Or wait - wrestling is fighting, isn't it? Close combat? Settle down, and don't appear eager.

"All yours."

And we ease in for movie number two, The Thing. It opens with people in a helicopter chasing after a dog, trying to shoot it. Already I hate this, hate it. They capture the dog and it's possessed, or something. I don't even even know, because I don't want to. I'm frightened out of my wits. Brown chuckles when I clutch desperately at his arm, but it's not mock fright played for laughs.

"Hey," he murmurs, after I duck my head, burrowing it into him, trying to make myself unhear the way I can make myself unsee.

"You all right?"

He realizes I'm not.

"You want to go?"

My forehead at the juncture of his arm and his chest. My nose almost in his armpit. I'm curled against him and I've flung an arm across his chest. Have I really? I nod.

"Shame. I'm enjoying this," he mumbles, "Are you sure?"

He's enjoying this grossness - the gore and spurting and muck and tension and terror? I don't have the steel in me to sit through it - I knew anyway, but I just wanted to be near Brown. I didn't want to say good night at nine o'clock, but I prove myself to be the little girl I thought I wasn't.

"'Kay."

We scramble to our feet, and we're the only ones leaving. Strong stomachs, one and all.

Brown's arm around me in the soft night.

"Not your sort of thing, huh?" he asks, gentle hug, discovering my tremble.

"Jesus - you're serious. I'm so sorry, Bella." Looking down at me as we walk along. I'm an anemone to the rock of him, I shiver in the wind.

It's not even that late - moon lighting our way, long secret shadows tracing our path. I could jump out of my skin at any and every scuttle from a night creature in this town that wouldn't dream of taming its wildlife. The dark woods harbor dark creatures; I don't what lies under the grates, or climbs the deep steps or slithers along the low paths and damp tunnels.

At my door - "Do you want to come in?"

He's grave under the porchlight. "Sure."

Hal sounds his warrumphing alarm, nails clicking on the floorboards, checking who's coming in to his domain. Satisfied, he pads away, and Brown follows.

"Coffee?" Me.

"No. Thanks."

"Beer? Wine? Whisky?" What do I offer him? Marshmallows? Celery sticks? Please don't go home.

"Are you having anything?"

"Um, maybe. Renee and I were alcohol novices before we came here but we're slowly educating ourselves with viking raids on Pip's liquor stores. I could probably mix you a vodka martini."

"That won't be necessary."

Does that mean you're going straight home?

"Just a beer. Thanks." Him.

Neither Renee or I drink beer, and why would we when there's nicer tasting stuff around, but amongst the celeriac and gruyere or whatever else Renee is cultivating in the fridge, there are half a dozen brown bottles. I hand one over.

"You?" he says.

If I drank a gallon of something very high in alcohol, I might be able to squish myself in the dog basket next to Hal and close my eyes instead of sitting upright on the couch all night, eyes glued open, scared of bloodthirsty aliens. But no. Don't want Brown to think I have a drinking problem, don't want to be wide awake thinking about what could come through the windows or the taps, or somewhere I haven't thought of.

"Come here." Softly.

He's on the couch. I sit down.

"You're white as a ghost. You really didn't like that, did you?"

"It was, um, gratuitous."

Hal snores.

"Where's Renee?"

"She's staying at a friend's tonight."

He's quiet. Quiet. Lifts the bottle to his lips and I hear the gurgle of it, hear him swallow.

"So you're on your own?"

Doesn't need confirmation. Renee elsewhere overnight equals Isabella alone overnight.

Air suddenly thick with possibility and hesitation. "If you're still feeling freaked out by the movie I could sleep on the couch."

Please God, please Mother of God, please Edward. If I am alone tonight with my fears, my hammering heart will escape its slender cage of bones and bones, and I will awaken in the morning simply dead. No more to tell.

Don't say yes too fast.

"Yes," I say, fast.

I catch him looking at me before he looks away, and he's intense and staring and his cheeks are hollow and his lips are plump. I guess he shaved this morning because his cheeks are baby-smooth if babies had blue shadows, but his eyes are older than planets. They can't know everything that's written in them.

Me: "I'll get you some blankets."

What's the point of him staying out here - yards away from my bedroom, if he's protecting me from marauders of the dark?

"Let me help."

Too warm, really, for blankets. I get sheets and a pillow, and a light cotton interweave thing. He should be perfectly comfortable.

"Bella."

Mmm?

"You still look kind of terrified. How about you sleep on the couch and I sleep on the floor?"

Pippa has camping gear. She has a self-inflating mattress. I pull it out and Brown and I unroll it and open the valve, and there you go. Instant comfort. He grins, amidst sheets and pillows and blanket and mattress, alongside the couch. This is a weird kind of intimate, spending the night together. Should he let his mother know? Should I let mine?

Somehow the hands of the clock have crept to eleven or eleven thirty and fatigue weighs on me. We take turns in the bathroom. Turn the lights off. Fully clothed, I slink under the cover I've brought from my bed, as he rolls under the sheet and blanket I got for him. Our heads facing the same way, we will wake with east in our eyes. I still feel easy, though uneasy, calm though not at all calm, and right, though wrong, with a racing pulse. He's too close, too far away. I've wanted him this near, but why am I so craven? Is is part of God's unknowable plan? It isn't, it's purposeless, and does me and anybody else no good.

"Bella? Sleep well."

You're here, and I imagine I will sleep barely, if at all. Too self-conscious. What if I snore? Or worse?

It isn't completely pitch dark, night and eternity not holding full purchase over people who live by the sea, and in the silver Hal treads to me. He asks if I'm all right. He knows Brown very well, but does Brown have my permission to be here after hours? If I asked him to, Hal would take Brown by the wrist and escort him from the premises. If Brown resisted Hal would insist, using whatever force was necessary. I know this about him. He would defend me with bonecrushing, because now I am his human, along with Renee and Pip.

Murmuring his name, my shabby knight. Thinning hair above his tail and the gait slightly wobbly, he remains nevertheless a soldier on the side of right. I give him the hard, scratching caress he loves, fingers digging deep in the folds of pelt around his neck where he's still rich.

"Edward is my guest. He's welcome here," I assure him.

Hal elects to sleep close to me, and Brown is at my side. If either of them are hostile extraterrestrials masquerading as familiar figures, my fate is irreversible, and my demise imminent. If they're not, I feel safer.

Head filled with such peculiarity, I can't begin to expect a restful night.

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	9. Chapter 9

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

How unexpected though, slumbering peacefully until my alarm wakes me. My internal alarm. My stomach - ready for a bracing and blazing infusion of daisy petals, horseradish and cloudfart. Eyes open with a start, day permeating the room, and there is no Renee. There is a still sculpture of an angel below me, startling pigmented hair, and features fashioned by a master's hand. Eyes may be the window to the soul, but what does that mean? It means irises, and shape and elongation and curve, and depth and expression and more. Now I see closed lids, and dense dark lashes - and the window to Brown's soul may be his mouth. Wide enough that his smile can envelope me; sparing enough with that smile that it feels rare and special. I remember his smile at me and his mouth on me, and I may have woken calm, but my heart rate becomes erratic and speeding.

Sliding out of my cocoon, on ballerina tiptoes to the sliding door to let Hal out, ballerina tiptoes to the bathroom and back, and Brown is recumbent yet. On his back. Beauty.

I could go to the kitchenette of this open plan space and make coffee, and either the sounds or the aroma would rouse him. I could shake him gently by the shoulder, "Edward, it's morning." I could kiss him full on the mouth. Or just leave him alone.

Shrugging back into my covers I sleep again. When I wake, it's to find him regarding me.

"Girl."

Statement of fact, or term of endearment?

"Very good, Sherlock," I reply. We're both so horizontal.

"Would you like something to eat?"

"Not before I get up."

He yawns, and I can see a couple of fillings. Stretches and I can see a hint of dark hair in his armpit. The heavenly statue is earthy and human. He rolls onto his side.

"I assume you know you talk in your sleep."

Oh, no. Is he teasing? Do I really?

Nonchalant.

Say, "It's nothing worth taking any notice of."

"Oh, really?"

"I was a study subject at the Sleep Research Unit. They said the ramblings of people in their sleep don't mean anything."

"I'll take your word for it. Who's JB?"

Fuck. JB was my boyfriend. He was my boyfriend from when I was four up until a year ago. He pretty much occupied my entire horizon until I didn't occupy his any more.

"A friend back home."

Shrug. Pause, significantly. "Who's Edward?" A keen look now.

Pause. "You are."

_What on earth did I say last night?_

"You asked me not to leave you."

I have no recollection whatsoever of my dreams. "It must have been the movie. I was scared witless."

"I got that."

Is he laughing at me?

"Do you think I'm a wuss?"

Smirking. "As horror movies go, The Thing is rather mild, so that _does_ make you a bit wussy. Even wimpy."

"If you're derisive you won't get coffee. My house, my rules."

"Coffee engenders derision abatement. Which way do you want to play this?"

Now_ I_ smirk. This has got to be flirting. Not normally any good at this, I manage, "What came first, the chicken or the egg?"

"The eternal debate."

Not in this case. Coffee coming right up, Brown. Stay where you are. Don't move, ever.

"You're kinda lucky my mom's not here, you know," in the kitchen, over my shoulder.

"Why? She doesn't like you having male guests overnight?"

Oh. Oh. Glad I'm busy, with my back to him, the incandescent blush a secret.

"No, because she makes health drinks and they can be a little, uh, inspired. Dandelion leaves, custard apple and ground pearl."

"I agree. I think I'm lucky." His voice is so close I jump. He's right behind me. I have to take Hal for a walk.

"Is that the time?" I say.

"You're a wuss." So quiet. _So_ quiet. I think I imagined it.

The coffee is ready and today is Monday and Renee will be back at lunchtime and I wonder what happened with Alisha and Blond. I wonder what happened with Mom and the mosaics. I wonder what happened with me and Brown. He's so different this morning - a shade of Brown I haven't seen before. Not sure if I'm coping. Quite certain I want to. He's out on the deck and I follow him to the perfect day.

Him, "How are you enjoying your vacation so far?"

"It's very relaxing." Not entirely true. "What about you?"

He doesn't answer directly. "How long are you here for? And then what?"

"Um..." We covered this on the first day. He's staring out across the sand and sea and summer and everything and I don't know if he wants a precise, calendarial answer. He's looking beyond the horizon. I think he's asking something more than his words are saying, but I can't be sure, and therefore I can't answer. I need to take Hal for a walk. Doesn't he work weekday mornings?

"I should probably get going."

No. "I could fix you some eggs."

"Ah. Eggs would be good."

I can do this. I've done it a thousand times. Have I? How many Saturdays and Sundays are there? Oh, yes, I've done it way, way more than a thousand, and Renee has improved on the basic recipe to the point that eggs from the beach house are to write home about. Fetta, sweetcorn, ovendried tomatoes and rocket.

Monday morning laxity, and Brown is out in the lovely air tugging on Hal's furry neck, and trying some martial art that involves tumbling and rolling and growling. I don't play with Hal like this. Testosterone is a funny thing. How can it work two ways at once? Hal will defend me and attack someone else. Maybe I would too, if I had something or someone I was responsible for.

Now, I'm responsible for an edible breakfast, and I need to acquit myself.

Turkish bread, the eggs, and the extras.

"Edward?"

He's opposite me at the breakfast bar, and I prepared juice, too. Pawpaw, banana and lime. Thanks, mom. He licks it off his chin and I could fall off my chair.

"So, about you staying right here in town and opening up an eatery," he says, scooping up green and yellow on his fork.

"Yeah, well."

"I'm going to graduate and open a music school. We could go into business together. People need to eat."

Mercifully my phone rings, because I have no idea what to say to him. It's Renee.

"Darling!" she trills. Her voice is a gift, unlike mine. Tuneful, toneful. In the presence of suitable conduits, it carries. If her pitch goes any higher we won't have glass doors to the patio.

"Hey, Mom, how was the exhibition?"

A birdsong of notes from my mother. I wander outside with the handset, knowing I'll lose the signal.

"When will you be back?"

Don't even hear her response. Sit down at the breakfast bar. Brown likes eating. Oh, he eats.

"So, do you have plans for this week?"

"No, Mom and I kept this whole time free. Reading, relaxing, you know."

"See you five o'clocks then. Most days. I have a bit to do here and there, but Suzy needs walking every day."

"We're pretty free, and five is good," I nod. And nod.

"You know Alisha wants the wedding to be this Saturday?"

"_What?_"

I didn't know. That's what happens when your Mom bonds with a hippy fashion designer and bypasses you in the planning process. Or when the planning director becomes embroiled in a flirtation with the brother of the person you are most likely to be speaking to next.

"We don't have any objections - do you? It's all very cute, and there'll be a party, and it's a social event."

I have no feelings for or against, really. They're dogs. They have no idea. This event is about cutesiness, and Alisha is the overseer. Brown will be at my house for an entire afternoon. No objections.

"Bear's going to be the celebrant. He's working on his speech even now."

Can't stem the tide then, anyway. These people are slightly mad. Put a garter on Suzy and a bowtie on Hal and send a photo to Pippa.

Brown shrugs. "You can say no to the whole thing."

"Oh, I'm looking forward to it."

Week.

Renee was a little late back Monday, had car trouble driving from the coast and who sorted it out? Gypsy. No. Yes.

Blond was on the beach Monday, smiling wider than the milky way, and jumping round like an ADHD kid.

Brown had his eyes on me Monday, and now and again a hand. My shoulder, my arm. Oh, this was something. But what?

I told Mom about getting scared at the movie, and about Brown staying the night with me.

"Did he make any moves?"

"No."

"Mmm. You like him, don't you? I like him, too. He wants permission. He's not going to get it wrong again, and misread you, or go too far. You're going to have to initiate contact, if you want to. That's what I think is going on."

Alisha is emailing and calling and ringing and speaking and messaging and she is all over us. Invitations. RSVPs. Plans. Suggestions. Mr Ninety thinks she talks too fast and he needs Renee, and Renee holds a spatula with onion marmalade on it as she nods over the phone to him. I escape to the woods in the afternoon, though Brown's eyes glitter. It's no escape.

"Sunday, Bella? Film night?"

Sunday, yes, if he would sleep again below me, breath calm and steady, dark hairs shadowing his arms, sideburns melting into the dip of his face before his ears, beneath those bone spurs. The sharp line of his jaw. What do his lips mean?

"Just the first showing, though. The early session. Don't laugh at me."

He's laughing at me. We both know why.

Week.

Blond finds the sand a trampoline, and the sea air laughing gas. If he could bottle this mood and distribute it, we would have world peace. At the very least, Alisha kissed him last weekend. But then, she is not a shy girl to turn a boy down out of nervousness, or not wanting to appear sluttish. I bet after the Sunday Horror they fucked. Blond has a new energy he can only expend in seeing Alisha. Touching Alisha. He wants nothing more; he wants nothing less.

Saturday, and we're on the deck, me and Renee, bemused. Alisha's invited all of the summer town, and enlisted boy scout types on lawn duty. Dogs galore. Alisha wearing a splash. Blond grinning like a fool and his arms keep finding her. Oh, yes, they fucked all right. His eyes say it. His mouth can't leave her.

And our deck is peoplespace, our lawn is dogspace. Food for the bipeds - halva and baklava and vegetable kebabs - snipetty-snips and protein crackers for the mutts. Spanky the spug is here, world's most unfortunate-looking and poorly-named dog. Brown has turned up in a suit and my brain left my body. Truly left. I am a hollow shell that I want to fill with Brown. Hal presides over it all with dignity befitting his age and status, and Suzy slides around like the eel she is.

Makendra is here, and I have never see anything like her. Why isn't she Someone? How can she be undiscovered? She is wearing a black leather bikini top, and a tight, tight dark grey skirt from her hips to her ankles. When she turns, I see that the seams on one side of the skirt don't meet. They are about three inches apart, exposing the entire length of her side and leg. Black buckles and straps hold the fabric, forming bands across her hip and across her thigh. There is no evidence of any underwear. Silver boots. This is what she wears to a wedding? Her stern, stark face is unearthly, and she is as tall as Blond. She looks like a space warrior.

Bear: "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to recognise and celebrate the regard in which two of our closest and most esteemed friends hold one another..." and he continues, not mawkish but genuine and sincere.

"To care for one another in rest and in play..."

"To support and cherish..."

Renee stands next to Gypsy, Blond next to Alisha, me next to Brown. Mr Ninety is with Esme, and Carlisle is hovering over Suzy in case she thinks she spots a rabbit. There are rabbits here, but they're not hopping. Ban the butcher brought them, and they'll never hop again.

After the service, thankfully brief - perfectly judged and delivered, Bear - it's time for more photos. Alisha designed a veil for the bride, and we have a window of about no seconds to get it on her and take a picture.

"I've taught her to hold her head still," Blond says, to Brown's smirk.

The tiara goes high on Suzy's head, veil flowing down, and the new husband snares the lot, yanking it mistrustfully off. _Don't mess with my girl_, flashes from his proud shepherd's gaze. I was the one with camera at the best angle, and my shot shows darling Suzy in a frothy halo, fluffier than her white ruff, eyes dancing to the prince beside her whose magnificent head is raised, glance fixed on his bride.

It only took a second for the veil to lie in tatters. "I blame the trainer," says Brown.

Then the thin facsimile of order imposed during Bear's speech is cast aside and no dog stands next to its owner. No dog stands, period. The puppy in all of them comes to the fore and they tumble and grouse. They lift legs to pee, and they offer one another the eternal greeting, involving under-the-tail, back-end acquaintance. It's all such a happening. I don't know how Alisha pulled together catering staff, hired chairs and tables and serving-ware on no budget, and I don't know how we're all standing around, upright, when furry fiends weave through our legs and the threat of up-endment is imminent at every second. Since my brain left on a cloud at the sight of Brown in a suit and tie, I don't know hallelujah from damn.

Enough partying is enough, and Alisha is so superb in her capacity as event co-ordinator that she she breaks it up exactly before it's too long, and she invites everyone out of our environs. Mysteriously, she has orchestrated the collection of all the hired items at the same time, and as the last guest leaves, there is no mess. Glasses and plates washed and put in boxes, tables and chairs stacked, all ready for collection. Bride and groom unfolded on grass, human companions ready for seating, sighing, and brow-wiping.

"I think that went well, didn't it?" Alisha burbles, enough energy left in her for Blond to grin in a particular way, for her to grin back. It's Saturday and Sunday has yet to happen.

"I won't be at the market tomorrow - I've got stuff to do. But tomorrow night - A Streetcar Named Desire?" Brown to me.

"Um. Yes."

God, Bo-bo, sound like you mean it, can't you? Trouble is, everything's different. Can't ask him to sleep next to me and allay my fears, I've already said I won't watch the horror. Renee will be home. Last weekend's progress amounts to nothing. I can't even climb all over him in the darkened room, knees astride him in fear and nose tucked in below his earlobe where my mouth just might have to explore, because I already said not the horror, not the terror, not the scary. Mom says I have to instigate. Oh, God, how?

There are two tall long people on the grass between me and the beach. Brown and Blond. It's dark. Suzy flops tiredly at Blond's ankle and I will flop tiredly into bed.

"Thanks for everything."

"Thanks for everything."

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	10. Chapter 10

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

"Bo, I've been thinking some more about what we talked about before." Renee, first thing. Not ominous, but portentous.

"Mmm?" I answer.

"I'm going to revisit my advice. I said you'd have to start something with Edward. Well, Bo, I want you to think very carefully. You like him, and he likes you, I can see it. So far neither of you have anything much at stake, but if you get closer that's all going to change. How are things going to be once you and I have gone home? It's going to hurt to leave him, you know. And long distance relationships are very hard."

Caution? Renee?

"I don't think you're playing games here, Bo. And I doubt he wants games either. One kiss can change your life. Be careful of his heart."

Through the nights I have been imagining him, feeling delicious in my bones and nerves and skin, flushed softly pink as the unself-conscious me put fingertips to his cheeks, heart not so aflutter but steady and strong. Shared, exchanged breath, lip to lip, mouth to mouth, chest to chest, hip to hip. I've had knowledge of desire and I know what it can do; liquid fire, melting limbs, fall into you. Brown, _us_, soon.

But mother, you sound wistful and wise. And serious. Are you advocating no? My sensuous dream, an unreality?

"I got you after one kiss, Bella-Bo."

She never talks about my conception. I turn quick eyes to her to capture this information, if it's to be at last divulged, but she has flitted, as she does. Now you see her, now you don't. It's Sunday; she's stripping the beds. I don't know how I came to be, but we have clean linen.

Making my way to the market later, I'm greeted left, right and all about. Oh, the wedding was marvelous, wonderful, fabulous. Oh, is it true your mother made that_ divine_ bellpepper and blueberry chutney? Oh, your Hal - so handsome, so debonair. That Suzy's a lucky girl. If I could just find me a human Hal...

And I look for Alisha. There she is. A sprite with the heart of a kaleidoscope. In a way she's a little like Suzy, with her effervescence. She's immediate and effortlessly, endlessly lovely.

"Isabelle! Didn't you just_ adore_ yesterday?" Slender arms around me, elfin body even slighter than mine, although Alisha doesn't look thin. She looks perfect. She drops to her knees to give Hal the same effusive hug, and I nod to Makendra. I never know what to say. If she was startling at the wedding, today she's frightening and she won't sell anything. She has dyed the quarter-inch of hair on her head bright pink, and she is wearing black contact lenses. A single, inky line falls from the centre of each lower eyelid, like an obsidian tear-streak. Makendra - why don't you own Paris, or Milan? Your unconventional beauty and your beautiful unconventionality is too big for this place.

Alisha talks to me about the bargello book from last week, how she's so inspired she's incorporated aspects of the designs into the cermamics she's been working on, and she's so alive. So alive. She vibrates at a different, higher level and she tires me, but I am so drawn by her flame I couldn't think of finding somewhere to rest.

Blond arrives, breathless. A quick, bright peck on the cheek for me. Same for Alisha, but on the mouth.

"Oh, Isabelle, would you mind sitting on the stall here for a couple of minutes while we go and grab an empanada? Shall we leave Suzy here, too? We can take her if you want." Alisha.

Not at all. Okay. Sure. And please leave the newlyweds together.

Blond has already moved a couple of steps away, and something happens. I see it, and he doesn't. Makendra reaches to Alisha, and her fingertips touch Alisha's hand. They exchange a glance that I am witness to, and suddenly I am privy to a quiet and dreadful knowledge.

Makendra.

Alisha.

They regard one another with sadness. Makendra has painted black, black tears on her face because she is weeping.

I have no clue whatsoever what is going on in Alisha's mind, or world, but she and Makendra are hurting each other. Oh no. It comes to mind that Alisha said Blond was too young for her. Why is she having this dalliance with him then? Oh, Renee's words echo, about being mindful with people's hearts. That means careful. Is Alisha that much of a hedonist, that she doesn't take care? Is she care_less_?

I have nothing but pared-back honesty for Mak, although I can't ask her what I really want to ask. I saw you yearning, just then. I didn't mean to. What is happening?

"You're so beautiful," I tell her, true to the bone.

A rueful smile. "Six foot tall and androgynous?" she asks. "You're too kind."

"But you _are_ beautiful," I insist.

"You think I'm what I look like."

In a flash I'm shallow and stupid and thoughtless and sexist. She hasn't chosen her height or her face. But she has chosen her presentation.

"Isn't that a big part of how you define yourself?"

"Yes," she says. "I challenge people without trying, simply by how I appear. But I push it. Then I judge them on how they speak to me."

For the first time ever, I thank my ordinariness. "I think we all do," I say, but I don't face what she faces on a daily basis. My noticeability isn't the first thing people notice about me. Hers is.

We sit, and she has no customers, but on Alisha's behalf I sell a set of egg-cups, and a couple of little bowls.

"How does your stock go?" I ask Mak.

"Some days good, some not so good," she shrugs. "Don't worry about me, Isabelle."

Alisha and Blond come back hand-in-hand, and I do, I do worry about Makendra. I worry about Blond. I worry about Alisha. No-one is exempt from the vagaries of human caprice and my worry encompasses all.

Brown arrives at the beach house and I've worried all afternoon.

"Just you and me tonight. Jasper was going to come along, but... he decided not to."

I worry for the ten minute walk to the community centre.

"Can we do something else?" I ask. A Streetcar Named Desire is going to be too intense for me. "Is there music on at the cafe?"

"Jazz. Yeah. You like jazz? Let's do it."

I'm known there, now. I'm known, thanks to Hal and Suzy and the Cullen boys. And Renee.

"Hey Isabella! Hi Isabella! Nice to see you Isabella!"

The waitress from the afternoons gets up, and she's a torch singer. She's flaming at Brown, and frowning at me. I don't comment. He doesn't. He gets me a glass of wine, and we listen to Ella and Billie, and the girl is really good. She has a piano player, a double bass player, and her aching voice.

Brown is a music student. And afficionado. Not a dilettante.

"This band sounds good to me. Are they good?"

"Very good."

Officially endorsed. I'm intimidated, because while I like to listen, and I will even hum, I don't really have music in me. Not at that level, anyway. I feel so much better about Brown when there's no-one else around. Me and him, and maybe Hal and Suzy. Blond when he's the way he was, and when he's the psycho-happy he's just been. I don't know what tomorrow will bring in the potential and assured state of tumbling Alisha, pained Makendra, and Blond the Inimitable. Losers can be one, two or three in a triangle. Brown orders food, but I can't eat.

I worry all the way back to the house.

Ask him. "Would you like to come in?"

Renee's home, and good grief - what has she done? She has been smashing plates ("You should have been here, Bo-bo - it was so much fun!") into smithereens, and she's glued them onto a windowsill in Pip's house. Fragments, shards. Sea and sky colors - teal and foam and indigo and seaspray and utter violet. "Home, sweetness, home". In the kitchen, above the countertop. Pippa will see it every day.

"Mom? Did you ask her first?" I breathe.

"She'll love it," unrepentant shrug. Renee.

"Tea, Edward? Beer? Daiquiri?"

He laughs. "Daiquiri, sure," and Mom makes a jug of the stuff. Mango. First sip, and I register she's used all the bacardi Bermuda ever produced and by the second sip I'll fall over.

We move to the living area and sit down and Renee and Brown talk while I drift into nirvana. I think I curl up. I think I lean against my guest. I think I tip right into him, and his voice shifts to a smile as his arm encircles my shoulders. My mother doesn't bat an eyelid at this man touching me, and her daughter collapsing into him. Art, art. They're discussing Gaudí's Park Güell.

I lose focus.

Next thing I know, blooms of light herald the morning and dear, clever exploding-head Isabella the Idiot is on the sofa. I had no dinner, and I drank an evil concoction comprised of alcohol and fruit. Fruit soaked in alcohol. Saturated in alcohol. Me. I am soaked, saturated and sodden and I deserve the headache. My brain hurts.

But - how can it be? There, next to me, not half a yard away, Brown slumbers in peaceful repose, the manna on the mount, the all I want, the need I battle. He has become a need, now. Renee said if something happened between him and me, the leaving would be harder. It will already be too hard. I suspect that every day it will get worse. There is something elusive about him that I just can't name, and I know a lot of words, in fact most of them. He is splendid and magnetic and jellifying. I am deeply conflicted about his effect on me, this polarising of the me I have known since self-awareness. This crushing elevation, this elating uncertainty, this shrinking expansion.

God knows what happened, but I guess passed out, ignominiously, and Renee must have offered him the inflatable mattress - why?

Blink asleep. Again.

What day is it? Does it matter?

He is faintly groaning and a stubbly smile and groggily stretching so that there is an expanse of middle. That masculine trait - that gathering of dark hair growing inwards to form an orderly line - I have to tear my eyes away before my fingertips can idly trace it. The fields of Elysium.

"Are you ticklish?" The daring!

"No."

That line, that line. An invitation, an instruction. I failed girlschool, and my nails are neither manicured, nor filed, nor whatever the fuck proper girls do. Mine are just mine. His midriff there, his hands adrift, his eyes on me. God - he's fucking cheeky, and he wants it. Like him and Blond, like him and Hal - he wants to grapple. Boys. So tactile.

I go for him, and I topple off the sofa, and I'm on him, and it's not funny any more. He's hard as a diamond, and though he turns us swiftly, I can't miss it. He pretends we're tickling, hands at my waist. Renee said I would have to start this, and he's giving me the opportunity, but I haven't thought about it yet. I have, but then I caught the sine wave. Want = distance = difficulty = unworkable.

"Eggs on toast?"

His arms don't try to follow me.

"So what's happening today?"

"Renee has an important meeting with Ban Ninety. He wants to sell her products to accompany his sausages."

Brown grimaces. "They'd be just as nice with tofu."

"Tell Mr Ninety that."

My mother avoids the kitchen for some time, and Brown and I have coffee and fruit and cereal. We eat outside, we watch the morning and the sun moves slowly and the shade moves in tandem and this is one of those shivers I know I'll look back on. My spine tingling, me alive in the blue and golden early day, Hal nibbling on his foot beside me, licking between his toes, making a strange hoinking sound. You've got to love it.

I clear up, Brown leaves, Renee emerges, morning, etc. Shall we dust, mother? No, because Pippa has a cleaner, once a week, dusting, floors, bathroom, kitchen. It's Monday. Is Alisha bisexual - has she happened to mention? I'm not going to ask that.

"Let's hire bikes," Renee says.

The foreshore, a couple of hours, back for mother to walk Hal. Brown played with me. He is inviting me to play with him. He is asking me to invite him to play. I have to leave. I know today is Monday, but I can't stand to look at a calendar, or think of a calendar, and know how long I've got. How long with all these characters - Hal and Mr Ninety and Suzy and even Bear and Gypsy. They're in me. Where Mom and I live no-one has touched us. We're different there. I don't know how it can be, but it is.

"So much is happening, Bo-bo," Renee says.

I know.

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	11. Chapter 11

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

From five to six and six to seven and all the time between I get to see how Suzy runs. How she's made for speed. Her grace and joy as her forelimbs stretch in long strides, lithe hindlegs driving her, and tail as an air-rudder. She wheels on a dime, chasing birds, seeking to group them and herd them and create a flock. They scatter in vertical projection, and I've heard some dogs can't register 3-D, only a horizontal plane, but Suzy doesn't know she can't fly. She takes to the air as they do, though is earthbound somewhat sooner.

And Suzy hasn't extended herself this way before because she and Blond have walked with me and Hal and Brown. Not walked, really, exactly. Skipped, gamboled, circled, tumbled. But today Blond is far. So far. Suzy dashes and splashes and flashes and crashes to Hal, back to Blond, to Hal, back to Blond. She could be a ball, thrown fast from her man to her husband and her husband to her man.

"Is everything all right with Jasper?" I ask.

Brown frowns a knitted-eyebrow face of knowing the answer, but not the whys and wherefores. "No. He hasn't spoken to me all day. That's not like him."

Don't want to speculate with no information to hand, but how can I not? It has to be about Alisha.

Still remote once we're all in the cafe - Blond. The singing waitress comes up.

"Nice to see you here last night, Edward. You know, we could arrange for a keyboard if you ever wanted to get up and do some songs with us. We've got charts. You'd have no trouble. They're all standards, anyway."

"Thanks, Tori. Say, what's this stuff on the sourdough?"

"John Bannerman gave it to us. Ask her," Tori indicates me with a toss of her head.

"She's always been rude," Brown tells me, the rudeness and its dispenser departed. "Is this another one of your mother's preserves?"

Looks like it could be. Don't all preserves look the same? What does it taste like?

"Looks like it could be. Don't all preserves look the same? What does it taste like?"

"Fruit?"

"That's a little unspecific."

"You tell me, then." He dips his little spoon into the dish of very dark red sludge they've given him. Holds the spoon to my lips with a look bordering on decadent and purely wicked, yet just this side of don't-blame-me. If I open my mouth to his offering, am I decadent and purely wicked as well? How do you open your mouth to a guy, and swirl your tongue around what he's giving you? Do you maintain visual contact? Close your eyes?

I hesitate probably long enough to indicate that I am actually baulking at this, and train my gaze along the spoon. He is inviting me to invite him, again, as he did with the tickling, but he won't touch me first. No. To do this I have to show him my tongue. I can't look at him. My tongue peeks out and I identify Renee's pomegranate and dark cherry.

"Yes. I could pinpoint the origin of this mixture with a fair degree of accuracy. Also the contents."

"Only fair?"

"High."

Blond stands abruptly, knocking his chair over, Suzy leaping to her feet at the noise and motion. Hal's head swings majestically. In no time, Blond's through the door.

"Guess I'm going," Brown stands too, watching his brother's rapid departure. "Look, tomorrow Jasper and I have errands to run for Mom, so we won't be around. And Esme enrolled Suzy in puppy school. She's missed some classes, but the teacher reckons she'll catch up. The session's tomorrow and Bear's taking her. So - Wednesday?"

We split the check, and head homewards, taking the beach route, the way Blond ran.

"Bear doesn't have a job during vacation?"

"Oh, he does. He's between contracts right now. He's a window-washer on high-rise buildings."

"_What?_"

"He's been doing it for a couple of years, and he's right into it. He works in the city. There's a crew of them, and sometimes they're on a suspended scaffold, sometimes they're in individual hanging chairs. He wears a harness with clips and ropes that's attached to a separate line to the scaffold or the chair."

"What does Gypsy think?"

"He claims she gets him to put the harness on when he comes home."

I shake my head.

"It's well-paid. Twice-paid. First for the work, and then for the risk factor."

"When you say - _high rise_ - "

"You look queasy. You know he's an engineer - he designed the safety harness himself. He tests it himself."

The thought of heights makes my palms sweat and my heart rate skip. I don't care if Bear has rocket boots and a jet pack and the ground beneath him is lined with goose-down mattresses. Let the windows be dirty - just don't send Bear up there. Don't send anyone. "Why doesn't he design self-cleaning windows then?"

"Good point."

Home, and Renee says, "Let's do something tomorrow, Bo. Something different. Out of town? What do you think?"

Fine. Pip's left a folder of brochures and printouts for us, listing local attractions, day-trips, and overnight-stay places of interest.

"There's so much to choose from!"

Dinner's ready, Renee's got her reading glasses on, Hal is brushed and fed and supine, and we peruse the literature.

"Have you spoken to Alisha today?"

"No."

Turn a page.

"Has she said anything to you about Jasper?"

"No. Why? Oh, at the wedding they were looking quite..._cosy_ at times, but she hasn't said anything. Do you think they're dating?"

I think they had sex and then I suspect Alisha may have told Blond that she doesn't want him.

"Um, no. Why don't _you_ date?"

I don't know where that came from. It came from years of wondering.

"Oh." The reading glasses come off.

"Bo-bo, I _do_ date - now and again. Not much. I don't seem to meet anyone I'm interested in, in that way. There've been a few, though. When you were younger you were my absolute priority, of course, and there was no way I was going to introduce someone into your life unless I was very sure they were going to be around long term... And obviously, I just didn't find that special someone. But... well, I might have looked on one or two internet sites, and arranged one or two meetings... nothing that's worked out. I would have told you. But Bo-bo, no-one wants to hear their parent is holding hands under the table at a restaurant, or kissing in a car, or actually having sex! You wouldn't want to hear any lurid accounts of that sort of thing, would you?"

Actually, all squirming and mother-related embarrassment aside, I would. It would be nice to hear that there's romance in the air, and someone is making her happy.

"There must be some nice guys around here."

"Then I'd be in the same quandary as you, wouldn't I?"

Yes, but. That was almost glib. I'm not your best friend, Mom, or your confidante, or whatever, but would it kill you to open up a bit more? The Inner Life of Renee Swan - A Tale Of Mystery And Intrigue. I'll be in the queue to buy the book of your memoirs. Maybe even get it signed.

"How about we just take the highway south and see what we find? There's a couple of little museums that look good, and apparently it's all very scenic."

"Okay. What about Hal?"

"Oh, I'll ask Gypsy to drop by."

Renee is so ensconced here.

Me, I'm tired. Exhausted. It's been another blue sky day, but a purple heart feeling. I want all to be well with the people I newly care about, but I can't make it so. Blond fled from hearing Tori obliquely propositioning Brown, and Brown a little less obliquely flirting with me. Renee - free-wheeling and happy? I'm free-wheeling and I yearn, so I can't put myself in the place of my mother's seeming single contentment, and feel the contentment too. I don't want a movie, or drambuie.

"I think I'll read in bed."

"Adore you," my mother says. And she does, she does. It's so fucking light, the butterfly touch of her regard, that I need her to remind me, and I have to remind myself - but she does.

Bear turns up alone in the morning, as Gypsy is under a car. Armed with my new knowledge, I ask if he's an adrenaline junkie.

"Bells on Fire, you're sweet," he grins down at me. I get a hug. His arms could go around me twice.

"I'm skydiving this morning, and I'll put Hal in a made-to-measure dog parachute. Then this afternoon we'll be heli-skiing. Don't worry about a thing."

"I'm not leaving Hal with you."

"The truth? I'm planning a lazy day. If Hal's lucky I'll take him to the beach to partake in an hour or two of lying down, and then this afternoon, I'm going to puppy school, with Suzy. Hal being a senior, I think they'll give him a mat, to oversee proceedings."

It's a nice day out, with Renee, and we do the museums thing and the galleries thing. We drive through a pretty canyon, off the beaten track, and we see a historic settlement, and we stop where we want and go where we want. If there were no questions hanging over us it would be idyllic. She buys me turquoise earrings. She's trying, because she knows I'm a worrier. Turquoise earrings.

Arriving back at dusk, around nine in this summer time. Driving past the cafe, on the main street. Is Brown in there, listening to jazz, playing jazz, making sweet music with Tori who wants him? I'm so insecure, and of course I am. He's not mine, he can't be mine. I don't want him to talk to the Tori's, I don't want them to talk to him. But he will and they will.

Hal's old hips sway precariously as he gets up to greet us - Marilyn Monroe style.

"Hi, honey, we're home," Renee says cheerfully to him, and we are. Home. That's exactly where we are.

Shame it's borrowed.

Then on Wednesday I get a message.

"Woods today?"

I know it's Brown, although I don't know how I know. I also don't know why he uses his brother's phone.

He meets me at our deck, and Blond's not here.

"Alisha told Jasper she doesn't want a relationship," but I didn't need to be psychic to have guessed that. "He's gone a bit AWOL."

And it's so underfoot and overhead in the trees, the air as soft as a sigh, the sounds muted by fern and moss and lichen and emerald emerald. You shouldn't really have dogs off-leash because of the wildlife, but we're lawbreakers, having let Suzy galumph noisily away chasing the movement of leaves.

"Why is it so tranquil in here?" I ask him, all serene. "Do you know any color theory?"

"Some, yes."

"Do you think it's about green? About wavelengths? Or is it about photosynthesis and oxygen?"

I don't know if I sound like I have an enquiring mind, or if I'm just simple. I don't want the science, I want the poetry.

"Probably - " he begins, when a yelp nearby jumps me out of my bodily confines. Another dog has appeared. Unknown. Off-leash. I stagger from the startlement, and Hal is in front of me, immediately. He rumbles a warning.

The other dog stiffens momentarily, and growls back, but Hal stands his ground. The dog is chestnut, about Suzy's size, and not friendly. Both animals have their hackles up but Hal is defending his territory, and his charge, his charge being me. The other dog concedes, loping away, as I get my breath back.

"Okay?" Brown asks.

"Yeah. Fine," I say. He whistles to Suzy and we proceed.

It takes a moment to realize it's not okay. How long is a moment?

"Hal?" I question, because he's not at my side.

"Hal?"

He's behind us. On the path. On the ground.

"Hal? HAL?"

He's rigid, and he doesn't seem to hear me. Whimpers, almost keening. Tongue hanging out. Saliva is running freely from his jaws, and he convulses.

"_Edward?_"

Urgency brings Brown running.

"Jesus."

Brown and I on our knees. Hal twitching, eyes not registering.

Brown, phone.

"Dad? Hal's having some sort of seizure. What should I do?"

Terse answers. Carlisle is questioning him. "First he was stiff, now he's twitching. His jaws are snapping. Yes. Yes. I can't tell. No."

Flips the phone shut.

"Dad's on his way. We mustn't try to move Hal. Stay here - I'll find Suzy."

He's cursing as he whistles, because Suzy, really, identifies herself as Blond's companion. Brown calls? What fun. Blond calls? Be right there.

"Jasper, answer your _fucking_ phone, you fucking idiot. Who needs your emo? Get here _now_. Behind Bella's house."

Hal now awake and smiling. His tail thumps and he struggles upright. He staggers though, panting, into me and falls over. When I speak to him he doesn't focus.

His brightness is dimming.

"Dad says it sounds like epilepsy. Does he have any history of fits?"

No. Pip would have said. It would have been in the Book of Hal. No.

Carlisle is about fifteen minutes, as I cradle Hal's head on my lap. He's swimming through the watery veil of my vision. I can barely see him, but I get the feeling he can't see me at all. Blond bounds up the path.

"I don't know where Suzy is," Brown hisses at him.

Knees, next to me. "Oh, Hal," Blond says.

Carlisle is brisk, professional, and tender. He has a stethoscope. Runs his hands smoothly over Hal, checks his airways, listens to his heart.

"Any idea what he weighs, Isabella? It doesn't matter, we'll have to lift him anyway. Edward?"

Seventy or eighty pounds. Brown lifts Hal tenderly, carefully, arm under his neck, arm under his haunch. Blond's retrieved Suzy, who thinks Hal's new game looks inviting. She bounds, yapping to him. Hal makes no response. Blond takes her home as I go with Carlisle and Brown and Hal. Call Renee. From the vet's clinic.

"German Shepherds have a tendency towards epilepsy... it can be managed with medication... there's no predicting how many seizures he may have, and how affected he'll be by them... nine years old? That's actually the normal lifespan for this kind of dog... I would have expected him to be a bit more alert by now, quite honestly... see how his eyes aren't following the light? Temporary blindness is common after a seizure... "

It's Wednesday.

Renee arrives and Hal's going downhill. He doesn't react to her voice.

"We can keep him comfortable and see how he is in the morning... "

"Can we stay with him?" unison from me and my mother. Our Hal, not sick and cold and lonely on a fucking slab in an animal hospital blocks away from his home.

"I'm afraid not. There isn't the accommodation. We'll do our best. Please be assured."

Maybe they will, but they won't hold him as he slumbers, giving him that scratching that he likes. Is there anyone here for him to protect? That's what he likes.

"Can we take him home?"

"He's better off here, under observation. We have night staff."

I have to be dragged out. "Bella, Bella, Bella." Only one person calls me that, hand at my elbow.

"They know what they're doing. This is the best place for him to be," Carlisle.

Renee, so quiet, small in her voice, which she never is. "I have to contact Pippa."

We're not given a prognosis - just "Wait and see. Call us tomorrow."

Sit frozen at the beach house. No snores and snuffles and grunts, as Hal heaves himself over in his basket, nose stuck in his tail.

"Drink, Bo-bo? Wine? Edward?"

What if they call in the night? No, I can't have alcohol.

"Bella, I wish there was more I could do," Brown's arms loosely around me on our deck, head bent. "Shall I stay? Would you like me to?"

"Yes."

They call at seven a.m.

"Is that Ms Swan? I'm so sorry... "

.

.

.


	12. Chapter 12

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

Handing the phone helplessly to Brown, I stumble down the hall.

So early. Too early to be told someone - some_thing_ - you love has gone. Oh, Renee. Sit on her bed, touch her shoulder, though I don't know how I'm going to word the tidings.

A sleepy "Bo-bo? What are you doing here? What time is it? Oh no."

So I bore the news I couldn't bear, without having to say anything.

Brown's making coffee in the kitchen and Mom's on the phone to Pip in the bedroom.

"It was peaceful. He was in no pain," Brown says.

"He just slipped away," Brown says.

"They're not entirely sure of the cause of dea- they're not sure exactly what happened. They can perform a post-mortem if Pippa requests it," Brown says.

"They need to know what to do with him," Brown says.

"Would you like to go and see him?" Brown says.

"Thank you for being here. You make nice coffee."

"It's not as good as yours."

Renee has wandered out disheveled in sleep pants that have seen better days and a mismatched camisole.

"Oh, Edward, excuse me," she mumbles, hand stuck in her hair, idly pulling at a tangle.

"I want to see him," I say.

"Yes," Renee says. She takes her coffee to the deck. Brown and me, opposite, the breakfast bar, quiet.

"I'll drive you. We could take Pip's car, or I'll go home and get mine. We can go as soon as you're ready."

Everything here is only ten minutes' walk away, even the vet's.

Showered, changed, Mom and I get in the car anyway, and Brown takes us. When I see Hal is when I cry, though my tears are little and stubborn. Renee sobs freely, and she is the one Brown holds.

"He was very happy with you and Bella," Brown assures her in an unsteady voice. "He had a great few years with Pip, and he was obviously very attached to the two of you."

Brown tells the staff that Hal's owner asked for the body to be dealt with by the vet, and he takes us back to the beach house. It's still only nine o'clock. Early.

"I have to go and work, but only for a couple of hours. I'll come back and I'll bring you lunch. Or do you want to come to my house? I'll be the only one home, but it'll be a change of scenery for you. Suzy will be there."

"No. Thank you. I've got things I can get on with. I'd like to be busy," Renee.

"I'll stay here, too." Me.

He lingers, though he's got work to do. He lingers at the door, and I go outside with him. He lingers on the deck and I go down the steps with him. He lingers on the lawn and I walk him to the beach. The beach!

"Oh, Edward - our afternoons on the beach!" I say with dismay.

"You're not going to stop coming, are you?" he asks quickly, concern shooting through his expression.

"No. I can't afford to. I'm overweight and I need the exercise," I reply.

Doesn't laugh, or even smile. It wasn't funny, anyway.

"You don't believe for even half a second that you're overweight, do you?"

"No. Stupid remark."

By eleven Alisha has turned up, and has joined Renee who suddenly decided to clean the bathrooms. I've found cobwebs in corners, and I'm not getting rid of them, because I like them, but I am finding I'm examining them to see how they're constructed, and then finding I've been staring at the air in front of them instead.

"Jasper called me," Alisha is saying. I'd wondered how she knew. "I came straightaway. What arrangements need to be made? I'll take care of them. Will there be a burial? A cremation? Renee, if you want to keep it a family matter, and private, I understand, but this whole community loved Hal. We could hold a memorial. A celebration."

"We only just celebrated on Saturday."

"He's worth celebrating again."

She's on the phone, on the internet, planning, talking, inviting, advising. My contemplation of arachnid weaving comes to a conclusion and I sweep the floor. Cleaning as cleaning is redundant here, though not as an activity. It's therapeutic, and it fills in time.

Brown arrives with pastries, to be told that Alisha has organized a function for this evening.

"Can I help with anything? Do you need furniture moved? Do you need me to drive anywhere?"

"Hmm... Jasper's offered all that, too. I asked him to collect those trestle tables we borrowed last weekend. Could you call him and see if he needs a hand? Folding chairs. Plates. He's got a list."

"Come for a ride, Bella? Oh, eat first. I'll make coffee?"

He's at my shoulder.

"How are you?" Quiet, almost whispered.

"Lost." Whispered back. "I want to shed my skin and emerge winged and fly away."

He and I go to help Blond with bringing things and I'm glad to be doing something meaningful. Setting up the garden for the event. Renee is cooking. Blond is strained, but Alisha isn't. She's getting on with everything. Esme is in the kitchen, chopping.

"Suzy!" Blond exclaims, suddenly. "Come on Isabella, we'd better get our girl."

There are three in our party, soon to be four, as we traverse the sand.

"Have there ever been shipwrecks here?" I ask Brown. "Are there starfish? Did you live here when you were a kid? Can you run from one end to the other?"

When Suzy sees us she wants to know where we're hiding Hal. Round and round us, through our legs, unbalancing me. I fall into Blond and when we're both on the ground she's on top of us. She likes this game and her tongue goes in my ear, making me squeal. Brown's growling as he pulls her off. Blond's laughing - he was underneath me, arms around me trying to push his crazy dog away, our legs caught in each others. Embarrassed, I apologize, and he just grins - "Hey... no bones broken." He's embarrassed too, though. Brown scowls.

We take Suzy to the shoreline and Blond throws sticks for her, which she likes, and he chases her, which she likes, and he dodges and ducks when she chases him, which she likes. But she keeps stopping to look around her. Scenting the air; ears, eyes and nose all asking a question of the breeze. Her eyes ask us too, and now and again she yells it out. Where is my_ other_ friend? You know who!

My heart already rent, it tears further at her growing puzzlement, at the way she starts running at me and nudging me with her nose. Growing more insistent.

"Hal?" her eyes plead. "Where is Hal? _You_ know where he is. He's always with _you_. Give me Hal."

Her plume of black and white slows its ever waving as she runs back to my house, despite Blond calling her. We all trudge in her wake as Suzy searches. Such a funny, clumsy, rushing young thing, chairs fall in her wake. She does a circuit, again and again, and then whimpers, scratching at the door. She can smell him, so he must be in there. Her search proves fruitless and now she's running around and around me, back to the desperate nudging.

"Why aren't you letting me see Hal?"

People start to arrive, and it's nothing like a wedding. In work clothes, they stand around morose. A smaller gathering. Flowers, laid on the ground. Suzy will trample those, or pee on them.

Bear, "Friends, we meet today to farewell and honor one we have lost. One of the best of us. Ever staunch, ever loyal, ever faithful..."

There isn't a need to make this spectacle of Hal's passing.

"A favorite in the community, a majestic presence, a trustworthy companion..."

Everybody, go away, leave us. This is about me and Mom. Who else is allowed to feel sad? We're talking about a dog. All this, for a fucking _dog_? Don't want to listen.

Inside, there's a tureen of iced tea with lemon slices and mint leaves floating on the surface and I scoop myself a glass and slug it up. I've cried a bit, after all. I've probably lost a quart or so of liquid. I drink some more, although on second thoughts it's not quite iced tea, unless it comes with the prefix "Long Island." No, it's not bitter and reeking of a distillery and spilt barrels of stuff you wouldn't quaff unless you had tattoos and lived on the high seas under a skull and crossbones. But. Did you add frangelico to this, mother? You would.

Everyone is outside and my sneakers make no sound on the floorboards, unlike the uneven clicketty-pad of an elderly dog plodding around. Where is he now? On a slab. Could he have come home just for a while? He belongs here! No, because decomposition starts to happen so quickly. It's summer. We could have gotten some huge stainless steel pan and arrayed him in ice, couldn't we? Or whatever there is of him should come here - in an urn, or whatever. I'm angry now, because Pippa didn't want to bring him back to this wide wild beach where he roamed and presided. Where the fuck is she, anyway? What's the time where she is?

Her number is on a note next to the laptop, and I log on and dial. She comes on and she looks as though she was asleep.

"Oh, Iz-bo." Haggard, puffy-eyed, tired. "You were with Hal when he had the fit. I'm so glad. I'm so glad it wasn't late at night, when he was alone. I'm so glad he had you."

She's devastated - and she's grateful to me. I'm quiet. I'm wired and upset, but after all, in a moment of clarity, I wonder about her point of view. Her beloved dog died on my watch. She could have been blaming. She's not.

"I'll be home soon. Please, don't change anything. Don't take his basket away. He's still a part of my house and my life."

"We've got a kind of a wake happening. Alisha put it together."

"She's a good friend. Heart of sunshine."

I have to say it, almost an accusation. "You didn't want Hal to come home?"

Long breath. "Renee said they hadn't established the cause of death. If they keep him and examine him, it might help. Every case that can be investigated helps, Iz-bo."

The inference is that they're going to cut him up. I bite my lip, and she bites her lip back, but I know she's right. Her heart's in the right place and my brain agrees, even if my gritted teeth threaten lockjaw.

"Thanks for getting in touch. Thanks for looking after my boy. It's nice to talk to you. I hardly know you, Isabella. I'll see you in a few days. I'm looking forward to it."

Outside again, after a stop at the sideboard where the strange elixir maintains pride of place. Have to keep up my fluids. My tongue, my nose, finely attuned now that my mother is an epicure, pick up rosewater and vodka. Passionfruit? I should be a perfumer. My mouth picks up rinds and foliage. I dimly hope that the alcohol is attenuated by all the other additives.

Surreality holds court outside, sun yet to quit, cerise and lavender on the skyline, first star. Music and dancing. Not sombre, but not like the wedding. Hello, Mr Ninety, Makendra, Carlisle, you from the drugstore, you from the newsstand, you from the from the from the.

Makendra is with Bear.

"You know each other?"

"We were at school together. We're great friends. And I like tall girls. I like you, too, Bells on Fire, by the way, as you know. I'm not heightist, in the slightest. I like you and Marie Antoinette."

"Marie Antoinette?"

"Your mom. She's french, isn't she?"

Bear ambles away and Makendra raises a glass to me. As always, she could stop traffic. Wearing a perilously short black dress, high-necked, with a leather collar.

"Where do you get your clothes?"

"Alisha."

"They're Queen Mab?"

"No. These are called Lady Mak. They're all for me. She says I'm her muse, but actually I'm her mannequin."

Makendra may have had some of the iced tea as well. She turns to the table behind her for another glass, and I see the dress is virtually backless, with a series of chains hanging from the collar to her waist and below, like strings of pearls.

"Oh," I say, lamely.

"I think you've guessed, haven't you, Isabelle? It's all so full of pathos. I'm in love with Alisha, but she's not gay. However, she designs clothes for me. I'm sorry about Hal, for what it's worth."

"Thank you."

Well, now I know one thing. I drift on, following Makendra's gaze. She could see Blond and Alisha, talking. Can't go near them. Can't go near anyone. What is this forcefield everyone is emitting? Or is it me? Am I a ghost? A projection, while the real Isabella Swan paces endlessly in a jeweled forest, proud sentinel at her side, onwards, onwards, no rest nor pause...

"Come and sit a while. Have you had anything to eat? I'll get you something. Wait here."

I don't even know who said that, although I could guess, using the process of elimination. Someone caring, practical and trustworthy. Mr Ninety. Esme.

Brown returns with a sandwich, and water.

Tell him, "I don't want to be here."

"Okay."

We slip away to the beach as the evening rises. We walk from one end to the other and back. We find a place to sit with a sandbank behind us. I curl, and maybe I sleep, because when I next look the sea is silver-tipped black, instead of the furling violet it was when we sat down. Brown's right there, right there, on his side facing me an inch away. An inch. On this night.

In grief and dream-sleep, I am disinhibited enough to kiss him. My neck at a difficult angle, curving and stretching to bring my mouth to the right place, my lips briefly to his. Nothing. I repeat, a little more firmly. He stirs, and his eyes flicker open. An inch away. I can't do it again, because it's accosting. People have been placed on trial for this.

"Bella?"

Oh, his voice is so husky and deep and I'd crawl into it to be enveloped, though I like the eiderdown of tonight's soft cover too.

"Bella?"

He's awake. I kiss him again, so he'll know it. My lips to his, but he sits up, away from me.

"No. Not like this."

No? I sit up too, sorrow upon sorrow, trembling, black sea and black sky witness to what I've done. He's been kind to me, and I did something to him when he wasn't really in a position to consent. What does that make me?

"Bella?"

I'm more upset with myself than he could be with me, but I face him.

"I shouldn't have done that. Can we just act like I didn't? I'm sorry."

Quiet.

"What is the saline content of tears? What's the salinity of the ocean? Are our eyes seawater? Because that's where we came from?"

"I don't know what you want," he says. "But never mind no. Kiss me."

I try to stand up, to stumble away and leave, but his hands come to my shoulders. One moves to my jaw, urging me gently. In such dark, his mouth finds my chin first, sighs into me, meets my lips. I open my mouth automatically, moving with his, seeking how to make us fit and seal, only to find he doesn't kiss like that - the fitting and sealing. He draws back in a second, but approaches at a new angle before I can panic, then does it again. Advance, retreat. I chase him, whimpering, but he whispers "sshhh," to me, and he hasn't gone anywhere. His mouth is back, for a little longer each time, and his breath fans me as his lips mesh and manoeuvre with mine. I expected what he did before, that time before at the party, when his mouth fucked me, but he's not giving me that.

"Closer," he murmurs, though. "Side by side is awkward," and I rise up and cross him, knees on either side of his hips, ass on his thighs, and we keep kissing. His hands are in my hair and he could pull me up to his groin, but he doesn't. He doesn't put his tongue in me, either. When I extend mine he does one of his retreats again, though comes straight back. No mouth sex, no lap sex.

Then a groan. "You don't weigh anything, Bella, but I have to move my legs," and his hands grasp my hips. He parts his thighs and I sink between them, wriggling and squirming to get my feet around his backside.

"Is this okay?" he asks.

Oh, yes, it's okay. I love your mouth, your hands, your legs, your chest... Wait a minute - I _like_ your mouth, your hands, the rest. I tilt into him and try tongue again and he slides, smears his lips from mine, kissing to my cheek. When I look at him his eyes are closed in the starlight. He hasn't touched me anywhere apart from my head, and that gripping of my hips that was over as soon as it began. Those hands that lifted Hal, easy on me.

"I should get you home."

My phone hasn't rung, so Renee's not panicking. It's not an issue. But then - Renee wouldn't panic. So sure of the universe that if I was out of contact for a few hours she'd think rainbows were watching over me. I check though - No. And it's 2 am. My mother is insufficiently concerned about me, and my lips are tingling. Did I just kiss for hours? Did _we_?

"Edward?"

"Home, Bella."

.

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	13. Chapter 13

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

Brown says goodnight at my door, having held my hand for the walk. His hand is big, wrapped around mine, warm and solid. Real and here.

The glass of the ocean view house shows us no-one but us, as everyone has gone.

"See you tomorrow?"

"Yes."

Upturned my face, hopeful, but I don't get another kiss. What I get is his eyes closing and he rubs his nose gently against mine, then releases me. My key in the lock - he's waiting to ensure that I'm safely inside, and he goes.

Clock ticking, some insect sounds from outside with the seaform, but otherwise quiet in here. Maybe the silver noise of a star falling. Maybe a crowd of silent noises too small or high for my ears - moments Hal would have heard.

Plates, glasses, chairs, things have been neatly packed ready to be returned in the morning. Alisha's hand at work. The space is tidy and I sit aimlessly, wondering what to do. I know I won't sleep, but can't read or watch tv because I wouldn't be able to concentrate enough, and I like this partial dark anyway. Thinking and not-knowing and wondering. I kissed Brown and he let me, and he kissed me back, but not in any passionate sort of way. He was responsive, and non-escalating - still, he's on my skin. I go to bed, and I barely close my eyes.

And Renee wakes agitated and fidgeting.

"I can't stay here all day, Bo. I don't know about you. I think we need to get away. Just get in the car and go. Foot down. No map, no plan, no stopping until we get there."

"Foot down?" I want to see Brown, but I feel exactly what Renee is feeling. It's what I said yesterday about flying away. You can't outrun pain, I know that - and the hurt isn't bound to the house. It's not as though if we flee it will stay here and we'll have escaped. It will hover over and surround us wherever we are, until its cloud dissipates over time and is dispersed.

"Yeah."

Text Blond to tell him, trusting that he'll pass the message to its intended recipient, and Renee and I go, we just go. Pippa's little car is bold and jaunty, tight and slanting and bunny-hopping for Renee, willing to give us that bit extra, now that Gypsy polished its fenders. The black tar is a snake before us, we take it we make it, strapped in our rocket on wheels, hurtling to the undetermined point when we'll know we've gone as far as today will allow.

"Tell me when you're hungry, Bo-bo."

We have food from yesterday, so we don't have to wait for a shop or a market or a gas station or any of those prescribed journey-breakers. We drive until we turn around, and then we drive more, in the other direction. Radio, cd's, we sing along, loud as we can, and when we do finally alight somewhere Renee says wonderingly, "You know, a bit of abandon really does help the grieving process."

Yes, it does. A bit of confusion over a boy doesn't exactly help, but it ameliorates. Well, partially. Not really enough.

"How are things with Edward?" says Renee. "You're been very quiet about him. I did happen to notice that you two disappeared last night."

"We went for a walk on the beach."

"Sounds nice." She means it - no sarcasm. My mother would probably like a walk on the beach with someone. I wish I could do something about it for her - but now I have this quandary, into which I'm falling deeper and deeper. She pinned the tail right on the donkey, identifying it. My mother doesn't need a quandary as well. And anyway, the person she pays the most attention to in this town is Mr Ninety. We've given him his moniker in accordance with the principle of descriptive, though speculative nominalism. We call him Mr Ninety because... well, let's just say regardless of how well he and Renee get on, she's not Oona Chaplin.

So Mom and I get home later, we eat more leftovers, and we put a movie on. I don't even know what it is, and neither does she. Startled when I wake, and see that it's midnight.

"Mom?" She's in the armchair, arms enfolding a cushion, and she looks comfortable. She needs the respite, and I try not to disturb her, making my way quietly to my room, undressing, attending to teeth, ready for bed.

Oh - my phone, on the dresser, set to vibrate, rattles on the wood. A number I don't recognize. No name allocated to it. Who is messaging me?

_no shipwrecks that I know of,_

_occasional starfish,_

_I lived here as a child,_

_I can EASILY run from one end of the beach to the other_

Oh. Blond heard those questions, but this isn't Blond's number.

_tears are roughly .9% salt,_

_seawater is roughly 3.5% salt,_

_our eyes are not seawater_

There is only one person this can be from. Before I can think, I send, "Where are you?"

_the beach_

Sliding open my window, I'm outside, running down the path, hair streaming, wondering how far away he is. He's not far at all, and Suzy is a dappled shadow, at his heels for once. Want to throw myself at him, want to climb him, want to push him down and cover him.

"Uh?" he pants, stepping back to keep his balance because my arms are around his neck. His arrive at my waist, steadying us both. Not steadying me.

"Bella - hello? What are you doing?"

Subdue myself, let him go. Brown, what are _you_ doing, roaming in the middle of the night, sending me messages from a hundred yards away?

"Are you in your pajamas? Oh. You'll get cold." He looks uncomfortable, but I won't get cold. It's over 70 degrees! It's sticky and warm.

"How was your day?"

"It was okay. Renee and I needed to burn off some steam. We just hit the road, really. We drove until we turned around, and then we came back. How was yours?"

He doesn't say anything for quite a while. Quite a while. We're meandering, beyond the path to my house, but I'm not sure that he has a destination. Or maybe he does. Maybe it's not a fixed point in space.

"Ah - confused, actually."

I wait.

"Last night..."

I wait.

"You were very upset."

His destination doesn't have geographical co-ordinates. He's steering us towards an explanation, an answer.

"Last night was about Hal, wasn't it?"

Yes and no. No and yes. Some of it, but not only.

"I just want to know." "Oh, God, I don't mean to put any pressure on you." "I don't expect you to psychoanalyze yourself." "Ignore me." "Maybe I shouldn't ask, just leave it." "Bella?"

We've stopped walking.

He _is_ asking something.

"Can I do this?"

Turns to me. Lightly takes my shoulders. I know now how his head tips when he is about to kiss me, on a moon-streaked, star-cloaked night.

Strands of hair are blowing across my face, and as he dips his mouth to me, they are there first. A frustrated sound, from his throat. I raise my hand to claw my hair back and his hand is there before mine, far more gentle than I would be at getting this intrusion out of the way. On my toes because he's tall, craning up though he's bending, yes, yes you can do this, yes. We're there. Perfect, electrifying. His mouth moves and moves, his breath coming more quickly, and this time, his tongue, although as soon as he's given it to me, he takes it back, withdraws.

"Is_ this_ about Hal?" his voice is so low it's a murmur.

I swallow. "No."

Even quieter, "Or is it about something else?"

I think, "_You and me_," and expect him to pick up my transmission telepathically.

"I don't understand Bella. You'll have to go slowly for me. When I kissed you at the party - you stopped me. And then last night... well, you were different. And now. Have you changed your mind?"

I haven't changed my mind at all, but I have to try and explain that.

"No. I wanted you to do it that night - I was just - shy."

He half-smiles. "You didn't want me to think you might be easy?"

Bite my lip. "Not really that. It was so... intense. It felt too much."

Not smiling. Head shake. "Too much? Is that how it feels now?"

No. Can you read my mind, Brown?

Fingertip to my chin to keep me from hiding, he's concentrating hard, but I'm going to have to say it.

"Now it's not enough," I whisper and his mouth opens on an indrawn breath.

"Oh, Bella," he mutters, and I think I hear what he says next. I think it's audible. "You're going to break me."

_You're_ going to break _me_. I know it, I know absolutely. But I'm going to let you. There's no question of trying to prevent it. If I tried to stop this I would be Canute, engaged in futility. Unlike Canute, I want this engulfment by tide and ocean and elemental force. I want _you_. wantyouwantyouwantyou.

Brown pulls me by the hand and we're stumbling through the dry, fluffy sand to my open window. Suzy is hoping that we're playing but this isn't a game. He pins me against the wall outside in a hazy gentle onslaught of lips at mine, tongue at mine, body at mine. He has my hands imprisoned in his, holding them to the wall on either side of my head and his lips keep silently asking me is this okay? is this okay? and I keep silently begging him to give me more more until he groans and spins us.

"We have to stop..."

Why?

"... because I don't want to."

I've gone after him now that he's let my hands free, and I've grabbed his hips, pulling.

"Bella, I don't have a condom, and I don't want to take advantage, and I don't want you to regret anything, and this is very sudden and I couldn't _stand_ it if you hated me tomorrow..."

I'll never hate you. But I don't have a condom either, and I don't know if there are any in the house. Wait - you're talking about _condoms_? Oh my Lord. Suddenly this whole thing got more real.

"And I'll hate myself tomorrow if I do anything that I'm not sure you're sure of..."

I'm sure, I think, but he eases me off him, and him off me, though with more kisses. He groans sweetly when he takes my hands from around him. Suzy helps to part us, nudging anxiously, wanting attention. She mustn't be used to seeing people glued together.

"Bella, I'll call you. I'll call you."

He's determined, and he's gone and I slump, retreat to cross-legged on my bed. Rewind, stop, play, pause. Rewind, stop, play, pause.

I don't know why he left, despite his explanations. I torture myself over it, until the answer comes to me, and it's words. He'd asked if it was about Hal, and I hadn't told him the truth. For someone who doesn't say all that much he's still a man of words, and he's needed me to _tell_ him just as much as show him. He needed confirmation, verbal, vocal, out loud. I should have worked it out, I should have known. I used actions, when he needed words.

Too late to text him. But time is of the essence. Our time is running out, mine and Brown's. What do I want to cram into days? A love affair? A heartbreak? Oh, how nice. Kiss me, love me, kill me. But Isabella, no-one said anything about love. Monumental lust is one thing, wanting someone to touch me because he's beautiful... wanting his tongue because I want his words... wanting his mouth because I want his smile... it's still lust.

I'm messed up. I've got somewhere else to go after this, and a life to start leading. Don't get caught up with a pretty boy who's clever and interesting. Summer casts spells, and propinquity weaves magic, and the bittersweet deadline of a limited timespan blows attraction out of proportion, doesn't it? Makes things seem more enticing and delectable than they are because you can't have them? "For a short time only" the sign screams, and we flock to look, to see, to be a part of. That's it.

If I keep telling myself that, I'm not going to believe it, because my self isn't stupid. I want him, it's as easy as that. As difficult as that.

And, "Bo-bo," Renee says in the morning, blender just stopped in its whirring, yoghurt and wheatgerm and raisin whip in a tall glass, "was Edward here last night? I thought I heard his voice."

What were you doing awake at that time of night? Oh, insomnia, probably. Same as me.

"Um, yes, he was here for a while and he left." How cool is she going to be about this? Me entertaining a man, late, who she didn't know was here, and who might be after sexual relations with her daughter.

"Well, Bo, I hope you're using protection. Don't get carried away, and don't be foolish. And whatever you both might think, withdrawal isn't safe."

_Mom!_

"Uh, ah, um..."

My mother has an um translator. "You haven't slept with him."

I don't want another jabina talk, I would fall off my chair. Just as I don't want to hear Renee might be doing those things she described doing if she was on a date, I just can't go there, discussing something so private and scary and shattering as what might happen with me and Brown.

"Do you _have_ any protection, Bo? I'm sure Edward is responsible, he strikes me as the sort of guy who would be, but you should always be prepared. We'll go to the drugstore today."

I choke, just _choke_, and it's not the raisin smoothie.

"Baby -_ I'll_ buy them. Don't worry about a thing. I'll buy them, and that Angelina Webster person who works there will think they're for me, and she'll start rumors and gossip, it'll be hilarious."

She sees my face.

"Oh, my beautiful girl, my beautiful, _beautiful_ girl. I forget what it's like to be young. I won't do that to you, I promise. Please, I'm not really making light of this, I know it's something big for you. Edward's the first guy you've liked after JB, isn't he? And with JB - I know it wasn't like this. I can _see_ you, Bo. You're not like me, you're more like your father. Sometimes I just wonder where the hell you've come from, and then I realize it's him. I'm so sorry you didn't know him."

My father died before I was born, I've always known that. I haven't even seen a picture of him, although Renee says I have his hair and eyes. And nature. She said I was unexpected, just like his death. It's so rare that she speaks of him, and when she does it's like she's flown over by ravens, the shadows on her face and in her voice. Tall, skinny, dark-haired and quiet is all the information I've ever had. In the absence of him, I've conjured a wraith, faceless and wordless, to explain to me my difference from her. I dream of him, the unmet man. Renee, mother, fair, fey and present, in her own fashion. Charlie, my father, dark, unknowable and never. Are we going to talk about him?

"Look, I guess you'll be seeing Edward today, right? I'll go and visit that friend with the mosaics - Chevonne - and I'll drop by a drugstore somewhere, and I'll see you this afternoon. I'm sorry, Bo. I didn't mean to make you feel awkward or embarrassed. Never, _never_ feel bad about being a sensual being, okay? Embrace it. Love your senses, and love your womanhood. It's a gift to feel. Animals rut, and it's a compulsion for them - and who knows what they get out of it? But Bo, enjoy being in your body, and trust yourself when your body and your heart and mind connect. It's rare and precious. You know when someone's right for you, you just _know_. If that's what your heart is telling you about Edward, don't hold back. Let it happen. We'll work something out for the two of you, somehow. If he's what you want, he's what_ I_ want for you."

No, we're not going to talk about my father, not that topic. Wrong way, go back. But - an endorsement of Brown. Support, encouragement and faith, from Renee, fairy-wings. Oh, Mom. Are you describing what you found with Charlie? Something sadly so brief, so long ago, that has never come again? Is that why you're so whim-tossed and caprice-led?

"Edward and I don't have definite plans for today, but yeah, we're seeing each other. Probably this afternoon, I guess, with Suzy."

"I'll be back by then. Special delivery."

I blush, and she's almost-laughing, a smile like I've never seen. A smile with big words in it. Love, hope, pride, tenderness, fierceness, wonder, and even anguish. Hello, I'm Isabella. I'm so pleased to meet you, at last. Renee? You must be my _mother_.

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	14. Chapter 14

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

Even the inanimate pulse with something. Our rock world has storm fire boiling in its belly, and the moon prettily bestows the light she receives as she dances. Gone Hal guards another Bella somewhere else, through a membrane, watches another colt-legged Suzy. I'm here now, with you, Brown. At least, I want to be.

_He calls. Renee has white, white cartridge paper she bought from the art supplies store, and a selection of charcoal pencils. She and I, I and she, have pored over photos this morning on the desktop - Hal, Hal and Hal. I really didn't know of artistic aspirations or leanings in my mother prior to this day, but at one picture she leaps excitedly across the room, taking up a sketchblock, saying, "This, this, I want to draw this!"_

_He calls. I'd gotten up to stack our breakfast dishes and I don't know what has inspired her, but the washer under the kitchen counter-top is beeping, indicating the load of laundry I put on earlier has finished. Pippa has that most old-fashioned of domestic accoutrements - a washing line, strung up around the side of the house. Perhaps I've identified it wrongly and unadorned it's a decapitation trap for would-be burglars, who knows? But secure each corner of each article with pegs and these things will flap in the breeze like flags. Semaphore. Planes will crash into us, down the runway of my open heart._

_He calls. I haven't punched a name in for this number, and I don't need to. The phone sounds, and the digits showing on the little screen are already deeply etched, indelible, hardwired, already. I can see them when I close my eyes, and I could recite them backwards in code._

_"Hey, how are you?" Brown asks._

_"Well. Good. Yeah." You can hear smiles, I know it. Can he hear mine? I think it must be pretty loud. Like, shouting loud._

_"So, today - there's a funfair close by, at a little inland town a couple of hours away. We're thinking of going - me and Jasper and Bear and Gypsy. There'll be cotton candy and sideshows and rides - that kind of thing. Would you like to come with us?"_

_Would I? Wouldn't I?_

_"What time are you going?"_

_"Elevenish."_

_Would I, wouldn't I?_

_"I'd love to come."_

_"We'll collect you."_

_All the fun of the fair, yeah, yeah. Hop around, jittery, can't wait, what to wear? Jeans, jeans, fuck. Don't have much else._

_"Oh, Bo-bo, you're beside yourself." Renee._

_Sneakers or boots? Oh, God, toss a coin, make a choice. My whole future depends on choices, after all. A considered choice is a random choice that takes a little longer, isn't it? An educated guess is a guess that you pause about. Intuition that allows tempering with self-doubt becomes doubting in itself. Such a philosopher. I can't believe I'm this worried about whether to wear sneakers or boots._

_"When will you be back? _Will_ you be back?"_

_What are you suggesting, mother mine? I know what you're suggesting. Of course I'll be back! Like he's going to take me to his house! Oh, fuck, do you think he'll take me to his house?_

_"Bo, stop the pacing, please. You're distracting me. I can't concentrate."_

_So I go to my room and drum tattoos onto furniture. An hour to wait. Tap tap, knock, knock, bang bang, my heel on the floor. I'm going nuts._

_Mom's at the door, sighing. "Oh, Bo-bo. Come on in and sit with me. Let's have iced tea. Okay?"_

_She's musing at her sketching, humming lightly, no tune, just sound._

_"Pip's back in a few days." Nonchalant. She knows it's a lightning bolt though._

_"You've never said much about her. I only met her when we came here. But she must be a good friend to have let us stay in her house," I say. Because I'd rather talk about Pip. I refuse to talk about leaving._

_"Well..." Head to one side, head to another side, Renee evaluates her work. Chews a pencil tip._

_"We were close, and then we lost contact for years, really. I was in the one place, and she was traveling. We didn't really have cellphones and email then. Pippa went to see the world, and I had you."_

_Wait, I don't know Pippa because of me?_

_"It wasn't your fault, or anything, things just happened that way. Then she tracked me down, and you know, we've had phone calls, and that's how we've caught up after all this time. I was pretty surprised she asked us here, out of the blue, but it's been lovely, hasn't it, Bo? And we saw her just briefly then, before she went, and we'll see her briefly when she gets back. She'll have lots of stories to tell - she was always good at telling things. Always good with descriptions and observations and feelings...We were going to do a comic strip together, you know, her words and my art. I used to draw a lot of pictures. Never actually got beyond the planning stage, what with senior year and being busy..."_

_Renee trails off. It's nearly time to go. My hair loose, hair braided somehow, hair up with a comb, hair what? Off my face with a band, and Renee applies mascara for me, paints the tiniest black line across my upper lid with liquid obsidian, adds the tiniest flick at the corner. Barely noticeable - is it a shadow, is it my eyelashes? Do I have Brigitte Bardot eyes?_

_I'm ready to leap out the door when I hear the car pull up._

_"Bella-bo, what we talked about this morning? I won't be gone long. I'll be back around three or four, probably. If you're going to go back to Edward's this evening drop by here first. You might want to collect a toothbrush."_

_So fucking casual, and she doesn't mean toothbrush. She thinks I might have _sex_ today with _Edward_, and she's this relaxed about it. Who knows if his parents would even let him have an overnight guest? Just because you're so liberal, Renee, it doesn't mean anyone else is._

_Her arms are around me suddenly, tight and quick. "_Darling_," she murmurs, not casual at all, and Brown's at the door._

_"Hi Renee, Hi Bella." He's so polite. Mom's waving, "Have a good time, kids," already back to staring at her masterpiece, whatever it is._

_And look at the classic, shiny convertible at the kerb, top down, with a glamorous blonde behind the wheel. _

_That's Gypsy, driving, fifties sunglasses and a scarf around her hair. Movie star. Blond hanging about on the sidewalk, lean, long-legged. Enormous Bear squashed into one rear corner, head surely far higher than the roof would allow, and Brown holding the door for me. I clamber in with no grace, and Brown comes after me, Blond settling as front passenger. _

_"All aboard," he says._

_Bear is effusive._

_"Hey Bells on Fire, I'm so glad you're coming today, because I need you to be my singing partner." There are groans, though not from the driver. Turning, she winks at me, smiles so proudly, so fondly, not even into the mirror, not even for effect. She just loves her Bear._

_"Bear sings show tunes," Blond announces. "You didn't warn Isabelle, Edward?"_

_Crammed next to me, our bodies in close, hard, hot contact, Brown shrugs. "She might have refused to come."_

_"It's an artistic compulsion," Bear tells me. "These tools have never known artistic compulsion - they're too staid."_

_We've barely accelerated from outside the beach house when he begins with fingersnaps, "Well the shark has pretty teeth dear and he shows them pearly white..."_

_I know this song. I also know I would be paid to shut up, I am so bad, but I am hysterical with giddiness at the nearness of Brown and I will never feel the same again. "Just a jack-knife has Macheath dear, and he keeps it out of sight...," I warble thinly. Bear gapes, Blond laughs out loud, and Brown's head whips around, fast._

_"Well, Lordy be, I have found myself a singing angel!" Bear crows. "Bells on Fire, aren't you just one long string of surprises! Lion-tamer, anchor-weight to a restless spirit and then you sing Kurt Weill!" _

_"Sweet Jesus fuck, you're dead," Brown hisses at him. I'm still trying to figure out what was just said when Bear starts up again. He sings for ages, I sing no more, and when he stops it's only because we've arrived._

_Demonstrating startling wheel skills, Gypsy negotiates us into a space that's a couple of feet too small, and we tumble out like the Keystone Cops. Bear's unfolding is a sight-gag - he was origami in there. Brown extends like an ibis. Clicks and creaks and gliding as the car's batwing of a roof slides over the chassis and we face the entrance, the fearless five._

_Inside, differences of opinion emerge._

_"Food," Bear says. "Light beverages."_

_"Rides," Blond demurs._

_"Shooting alley," Gypsy asserts - the first thing I've ever heard her say._

_"_Baby_," Bear groans to her, "Never mind the fucking food. You and a gun - who'd eat?"_

_Two and one disappear, leaving two. So we're not all in this together._

_"What do you want to do, Bella? Ferris wheel?" Brown asks, but I dither. Fear of heights._

_"I'm not too good with - ah - heights."_

_"You might find if you face your fear there are compensations."_

_Yes? "You consider nausea a compensation?"_

_"Nausea, no, but the view will be spectacular."_

_Still I dither. Arrhythmia, sweaty palms, and the swooping certainty of doom await five storeys up, but what other compensations might there be? He has already denounced me a wuss. What about demarcating - wuss from reckless adventurer? That's an achievement I could aspire to._

_"Okay, if you have a very large and very absorbent handkerchief in case I throw up."_

_"As it happens I do."_

_He buys the tickets and we sit in the little cage and grind to a start. Jerk and grind. Up and and up. Sickening jolts as people clamber aboard, until we're all there. Universal truth - there's no view if you close your eyes, but simply from the air, I feel as though we're too close to the lower rim of the sky._

_"Bella? Oh, fuck, I've done it again - haven't I? Done something that's made you nervous..."_

_Just like the movie night, my face is in his shoulder, and I mumble, "I'm really not this pathetic. It's all an act." _

_"Okay, I guess you're not appreciating the outlook right now, so you stay wherever you feel comfortable, and I'll describe it. That's what I dragged you up here for."_

_Both his arms hold me, so it's not all bad. Not so bad._

_"This town's kinda small - we can see over rooftops and down streets. It's a fruit-growing region round here and a little further out there are lots of trees in neat, orderly rows. The farms have some livestock, too, so there are paddocks with cows - those black and white ones that people don't eat. There are rows of berry plants - strawberries and raspberries. I bet some of the produce Renee buys comes from here. It's very picturesque. I'm really sorry, Bella. It's very pretty, and - oh, hey, I can take pictures with my phone and show you when we get back down. The greens are lovely - do you like green? Are you still alive in there or have you suffocated?"_

_"I'm alive." Small, muffled, stupid. Why am I so stupid?_

_"You're really brave you know, to have come up here anyway when you knew you'd be scared. I'm going to buy you the biggest serving of fairy floss there is."_

_I poke him in the ribs, and get a grunt in response._

_"What's your problem? Too health-conscious for fairy floss, missy?"_

_"I'm worried about your diabetic predisposition."_

_He snorts, "Oh, don't worry about me. I wasn't planning to share. I'm having one of those ice-creams with chocolate sprinkles."_

_Poke him again._

_"Is that Bella-speak for you want a chocolate-sprinkle ice-cream too?"_

_"No, it's Bella-speak for when are we getting off this vertical nightmare?"_

_His chest heaves as he laughs at me, and I want to hold him forever. Forever. I've slid a little and I'm nestled with my nose just over his pectoral muscle. If he wasn't wearing a jacket, if he wasn't wearing a t-shirt - how would this feel to him? If he was nuzzling me in the same place I would die of pleasure and longing._

_Jolt, sick, creak, terror, heave, descend, sink with visions of timbers breaking and freefall and splintering and the plummet and I palpitate to the ground which rises to meet us. I think. I have to be helped out. Then I have to orientate myself._

_God, can we try something I'm good at? Something where I don't score less than zero?_

_There is something. I don't want to suggest it, because I don't want to so pitifully try to self-redeem. Surely we'll get there. It's already been mentioned._

_And we make our way around, Brown very tall next to me, and he thinks I'm made of goosebumps now, he thinks I'm fragile and I'll fall over if someone sneezes. If I sneeze. I said I'm not pathetic, but I need to prove it._

_The rifle range._

_"Would you like a fluffy toy? Shall I win one?" Brown asks in such a tender, velvet, fluffy-toy voice, sure and almost smug._

_Oh, yes. Show me what you're made of._

_"Let's both have a go," I say._

_It's pretty ridiculous really - rows of cardboard ducks a few yards away bobbing precariously along, and if you hit three of them you get some ghastly synthetic fluro-striped snake or something. So Brown really wants to do this?_

_He goes first. Three shots, three hits. Well done._

_"Pick your prize from the bottom row," the attendant says._

_"Bella?" Brown asks. The bottom row holds nothing anybody would want. None of the prizes are anything anybody would want, to be honest. It's not like they'd give away anything that's not a piece of sentimental junk. In these sorts of towns there are farmers and hunters, who know how to shoot to kill. The stall owners don't want to give away anything too valuable. However, unbeknownst to them, or to Brown, or to anyone I know including my own mother, I could shoot to kill. My father was a police cadet, although I don't know if that's got anything to do with anything._

_I am given my three shots, and I pick off the hardest targets - the smallest and fastest ducks._

_"Uh?" the guy says, because I look like neither a farmer or a hunter._

_Brown starts to laugh as I hand over three bucks for another go. Three shots, three hits, top shelf._

_"Well, aren't you just a string of surprises?" he says once he's finished laughing. The prizes are all rubbish, and I don't want any of them until I spot in the corner, on the bottom shelf after all, a hint of black and tan, hidden by a pink koala._

_"What's that?" I point. It's a crappy, stupid, ill-shaped, glossy Alsation._

_"I want that one."_

_Bottom shelf, after all. I blink tears away as I take it._

_"I wonder how long that's been sitting here, waiting for you," Brown smiles. "Sharpshooter."_

_Hugging my toy, and his arms come around me. I turn my face up, to see what's in his. _

_"What are you going to name him?" he smiles quietly in a whisper, in a world that knows me and Brown and a black and tan dog, and we're enclosed, encircled, enfolded in on one another, my head tilting up._

_"I think you know," I whisper back._

_Shall we find the others? Our musketeers? Don't mind if we do, don't mind it we don't, happy right here._

_But they find us, as it happens._

_Soft, full, gentle and killing me, Brown's lips just touch my mouth, and to one side I hear, "You owe me twenty bucks, dude."_

_It's Bear._

_"Never bet against a sure thing," he adds._

_Blond's voice replies, "Get fucked."_

_._

_._

_._


	15. Chapter 15

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

Oh, Blond.

You and Bear wagered money - on what? A sure thing. What was the sure thing? Any of an incalculable amount of possibilities. Is it to do with what Bear said on the way here? Lion-tamer? I didn't understand, and it's not like I can clarify it with anyone.

We all wander to a marquee, and go in, discovering tables with blue rosettes on sticks accompanying groups of articles. Awards awarded for produce in clusters of three things. Roundest onions! Straightest beans! Reddest tomatoes! Is this for real? A clusterfuck of clusters. The exhibit isn't well-attended either by spectators or officials, and Bear casually reaches towards the three whitest eggs, removing one. He places one of the longest zucchinis between the remaining two eggs.

"Most penis and testicles-looking edible matter!" he proclaims, and my cheeks hurt from snickering. The zucchini is about eighteen inches long. Bear: "Reminds me of me."

He and Gypsy elsewhere, Brown glued to my side, until he stops to look at a cake someone has shaped and iced to look like a piano, and then I am alone with Blond.

"You're good friends with Alisha, aren't you?" he queries quickly.

"She's sort of more friendly with Renee than me," I admit, awaiting the next question, but it doesn't come. He's made the opener, but he doesn't want to ask me directly. Alisha hasn't spoken to me about him, and Renee hasn't mentioned that Alisha has spoken to her either. I can give him nothing. Brown's back a moment later anyway, and I'm guessing Blond isn't going to talk about this in front of his brother.

Meanwhile Bear's hoot of laughter draws us over to him. He has discovered the carved vegetables section. A scarlet bellpepper with peppercorns stuck in it to look like a ladybug. An aubergine with broken vanilla sticks poked into it to look like a spider.

"I _love_ county fairs," he says, sincerely.

We all roam, separating, convening, splitting, regrouping, for a few hours. Stalls, rides, sideshows, food. Brown eats fried rice, I look at pork and ginger dumplings for about three seconds, and opt for fried rice too.

All too soon, we're piling back into whatever it is - Gypsy's low-slung well-hung fuck-me dream machine. Not too soon to sit this close to Brown again.

"Jasper, your hair's so long and pretty. I could braid it for you," Bear volunteers, Brown correcting him, "Jas_pina_," and though Blond snarls, he hesitates a moment too long. Bear's fingers are in place. He does some complicated weaving before my very eyes, which actually holds instead of unravelling in Blond's messy curls.

"Impressive. Rather lovely," I say.

"I have many skills," Bear shrugs.

I'm silently enjoying the nearness to Brown, and I don't care about Blond's tresses, woven or not, though I contemplate them. Brown and I are hip to hip, rockin' through the wilderness, and he has eased his arm along the back of the seat. It means we're even closer. Rib to rib. Away from Bear's flailing elbow.

Outside my house, Gypsy stops and I don't want to get out. I don't know what to do.

"Thanks for a great afternoon," Blond says, though once he sees his hair he may think I'm not an ally.

"Thanks for the ride," I offer to Gypsy.

"Thanks for the fun," to Bear.

"Thanks for the terror," to Brown who is disentangling those long, long legs to stand beside me. "Don't leave this behind," he says, handing over my dog, which I'd dropped in the difficulty of scrambling out.

"Spanky. How could I forget?" I say with gratitude, and he laughs.

"_Spanky_?" He's been laughing all day. I fucking like it. It almost eases the disappointment that he's saying goodnight to me now. Almost, but nowhere near.

It's strangely quiet from the car as he walks me to the door.

"Not too traumatized from the vomit-inducing heights?" he asks, mouth close to my ear.

"M'okay."

"Not too sickened by the vomit-inducing Bear?" asks.

"M'okay."

"Can I see you later?" asks.

Oh. He does that nose thing again. Has me by the shoulders so lightly it could be the suggestion of an imagining, the thought of a wish, his nose so gently against mine I've opened my mouth for his but that's not it.

"Later when?"

"Family dinner business tonight. Afterwards. Say, eleven - is that too late? Will you be home? Will you still be up?"

For you, yes. For the possibility of you, yes. For the anything of you, yes.

"Message me."

An exchange of smiles under the fading of the day, and the oncoming of the night. Each as smooth and gradual in relinquishment, each bestowing of silk and shadow and lovely, because he's here.

"_Spanky_?" he repeats, and he's gone.

"Bedside drawer," Renee says, as soon as I walk in.

"Oh," she says, seeing my acquisition.

"Where's your boyfriend?" she says, and in case her morning occupation with charcoal has caused her to forget a palette of hues, I show her crimson, on my face. Not by intention, or will.

"He's gone home and left you?" she asks with concern.

When did my teeth get so big that words can't make their way out of my mouth?

I attempt, "I'm seeing him later," but I'm not sure what comes out. Nothing intelligible, certainly, because my mother just considers me, eyes almost squinting in her effort to hear.

"Ahh..." she says. "Well, I've had an invitation for tonight from that nice couple at the department store - the Newtones? I'm sure you could come along if you want. Shall I ring them and check? Mikhail and Jessamine?"

There will be countless days and endless nights ahead of me to spend in reverie, so I could probably use actual real-life experience for an evening to ground me in the now, instead of my floating in the delirium of what was and what could be. However I elect my own now, intangible though it is. My now consists of waiting, in this moment and many of the nexts.

"Thanks, Mom, but I think I'll just hang here. You go enjoy yourself."

Enjoy herself, she will. Mom enjoys herself at Target, chatting to the checkout operator, and at the bank, talking to tellers. Ha - _she's_ the teller. She enjoys herself at the butcher's, philosophy and sow's ears. She'll enjoy herself with the Newtones.

The door shuts behind her and I might as well watch a movie, with three hours to kill. Might as well read. Might as well bake a cake or have a bath. Spanky sits on the sofa as I ponder what I might as well do. What's this on the table? Renee's sketchblock. Might as well flip the cover.

Startled, I see my own face gaze back at me, at least a version of my face. I thought she was drawing Hal! But no, I'm close up, eyes deep and dark and thick-lashed, hair a hurricane tumble, lips and chin in fainter definition and neck and throat barely proposed. I wasn't aware my mother had talent like this! If it wasn't me it would be indescribably beautiful - this captured moment of a wind-tossed, intense stare from some sort of nymph - undeniably me, but I never saw me looking so wild, so self-possesed, so haunting.

I want to speak to Renee, but I can't - she's bidding an introductory farewell to some denizens. I want to run out to the beach, the startling me of the picture - and declare myself; plunge into the sea and emerge owning and owned, staking a claim on this place that has staked its claim. We have to leave in a mere few days? Impossible.

The number with no name lights on my phone just before eleven, and I've watched Fight Club. My skin is alive, I'm disturbed, and ready for confrontation. Perhaps it wasn't the best thing to do.

"I'm outside," is the message on my screen and I drift without touching the floor to open my window. Brown approaches like a slow storm, as I stand helplessly in the beforeglow. He emerges out of the dark, and I've had enough of hesitancy. I fly.

Halfway down and up the stairs to the deck, we collide, our height difference bringing us face-to-face though I alight on the step above.

He manages a "Be - " before I kiss him, and his tongue was already forward to make the "lla" of my name. He grunts, and his body keeps coming as I keep going, and his tongue keeps coming. I crash into both of them, and I don't pull back, or temper the contact and I wonder if it's too abrupt. I stop.

I'm not going to move away much, I'm going to twine myself around him, and I'm going to bind him to me, but I can't just inflict a full frontal, fully-clothed, bodyfuck manoeuvre like this, because look - his eyes are cloudy in the white-violet from the insect-detonator by the door and the lamplight from my room. His breath catches. I can't tell anything about what he thinks.

"I'm sorry," I say, and he appears dazed.

"No, really, don't be," he mumbles, and then his hands rise, they're secure, knowing, sure at the back of my ribs, pressing me to him. Mouth to mine. Minutes pass, his hold slides to my hips, still pressing. I'd halted the kiss, but he restarted it.

We haven't even talked - do we need to? Hasn't everything led us to here? All our moments, converging to this? His hands slide more, and they're wicked, curving around my ass and the fingertips straining and stretching, so long. Curving inwards and downwards. Are you really _doing_ that Brown - we're kissing! One step at a time?

"Oh,_ Jesus_," he pants, feeling me stiffen in his arms, then he restores order. He stops us, and says, "Can I ask you a couple of things?"

Into my room. There's the bed, and I sit on it. I have a desk with a chair - he takes the chair. So far away, color heightened, pallor interrupted by a flush along those prominent cheekbones, lower lip bitten by upper teeth. He regards me.

"Ah - "

He's uncomfortable, despite the tongue at my mouth like a kitten with milk only seconds ago...

"I've already asked you about this, but I want to make sure I've got it right. That night at the party when I kissed you, you shoved me away pretty fast. I know I was forward. I know I was treating you as if - as if you were up to where I was up to. But you were upset and nervous. I pushed you, I crossed a line. And then - fuck, like a fucking idiot, last night just because you kissed me I'm crapping on about condoms, like I take it for granted you're going to roll over and sleep with me. I'm such an idiot. I don't expect that from you, but Bella, I need to know where your lines are."

Oh, Brown, I _kind_ of have lines, but they're a bit blurry. I don't want to be confusing, but I think you melt them.

His voice quietens. "I don't even know if you've - have you - been with a guy before?" Seems upset and nervous asking.

Tell him. "Yes." More than one. Three, actually. TMI.

Not relieved, his eyebrows draw together, and he nods, frowning. "Mm-hmm."

Then, slowly, "Are you seeing anyone? Is there someone back where you live? A - boyfriend?" He doesn't like asking me this, I can see it. He's afraid of the answer.

A while ago, yes. But now, "No."

Quiet again, until he pushes himself off the chair and walks towards me. "Let me know what's okay." "Bella." Bella." "Bella."

"This is okay," I say, scooting myself back on the bed, still sitting, inviting him as he follows on all fours. Then he's on his knees astride me, hands on the mattress at either side of my shoulders bending for more kisses. Extremely uncomfortable for me, tilting my head back. My weight on my elbows for seconds, until I have to lie down. He's above my body to maintain the mouth contact, and it's all about our lips until he lowers himself to his forearms and his frame is messily on me. Between my spread thighs. He's fucking heavy. He's fucking hard. His mouth is hot and his tongue is smooth and rough, and at the same time as he enters me with it he pushes his pelvis forward. Oh, God, I know he's very physical - I've seen it when he's with Blond, when he's played with Suzy or Hal. His little touches to me, hands, hands. Writing on my leg, arm splayed out over my thigh, then pulling my hips to his dick. The time he tickled me, holding me on him, turning me underneath him. All the times. Now, his dick, again. He's so sexual. He asked for my lines so he doesn't overstep them - but he wants to feel me against him.

JB and I invented sex. We were the first two people ever to discover it. Once we did, we screwed each other until we were insensible, and then we screwed some more. He was always hard and always ready, my first and I thought my only, until he was awarded that sports scholarship. In Canada. JB was restless - his body could barely contain the energy it held, and a manifestation of that energy was sex. Running was another. He said he'd stay with me if I asked him to, but I couldn't ask him when I knew the power he had and the need he had, and the legs and the heart of him. He would have run back to see me every weekend if I let him, but we talked, and we decided no, though it tore us. We decided on a clean break, though it tore us. Training for the level he wanted to compete at, while studying, would take an indefinite number of years, and I couldn't go with him because I was a schoolkid.

"Don't wait," he said. "Don't sit around doing nothing with yourself and forgetting to live. You know I love you. Keep it and hold it, and be yourself. I'm going to do this until I can't do it any more, and you can't be moping in an empty house somewhere wishing I was there, or following me around from event to competition to event failing to be whole because you define yourself by your relationship to another person."

I let him go and I let us go, knowing that he was wiser. He did love me. He was born to run. Not away from me, just to run.

"Every race has one finish line - you," he'd said once, but we let each other go.

And since him I'd tried to prove I was okay. Tried to prove it with someone I dated a few times, and made out with at his parents' house. More than made out with, at his parents' house. But I didn't want to see him again.

Someone else I was set up with. Nice enough, but not nice enough.

And now I'm here, a boy on top of me, he's asked me what he can do and what I'll do, and his eyes are begging me, his body is charging, but he'll stop the second I say so, I know it. I want this, I want this all. I'd call a halt to proceedings this time no more than I'd call a halt to earth's diurnal course. This will happen. I wantyouwantyouwantyou.

Grasp his t-shirt, struggle with it. He uprights himself long enough to pull it off. I've seen him at the beach, his chest, his belly. - the paleness, the definition, the body hair that made me quiver. It's not the same as seeing him in here, although it set off the internal quake then too. My fingertips at his nipple cause him to hiss, eyes turned down to watch, then back to my face frowning hard. I sit up, seeking to lick what my fingers found, tiny little thing, flat and pale with a swirl of hair around it. He grunts.

"Your shirt," he says, voice unsteady.

This part terrifies me, although anyone can see when I'm dressed that my breasts are tiny. Sometimes, I wish that when I take my clothes off, my bra off, that plush, heavy handfuls will issue forth, and I'm still disappointed that they don't. I even dream that I am more well-endowed, but waken to find myself the same. I hate this, but he has asked me, and his hands are urging. I'm worried about him seeing and knowing how little there is of me, there.

But, "Oh," he sighs, and he stares, and his hands lift to me, placing his palms fully against my chest, the heels of them to the underside, and the in of them, the hollowed cups inscribed across and down beneath where his fingers start, to the slight swells of my breasts. He squeezes lightly, and moans, and whips one hand away, dropping his head swiftly. My nipples are surely normal size, that's one thing. He licks one as if he's savoring the taste, then closes in, sucking like I could feed him. Oh. A rush of wetness happens inside me, just as the rush of his mouth happens outside me, his other hand kneading gently, then forgetting to knead as his mouth concentrates. You _like _them, Brown? His mouth is holding and tugging lightly - he likes them.

Then my hands stray. I've had enough of hesitancy. As I explore his skin twitches, muscles flex, and I'm going south. Jeans, belt, terrain I cover without bothering to slow down, heading for the main event. I want to touch him there. I do, and he wrenches, shuddering, away from my breast where he's been dampening me. I trace the outline of his dick, the form, his head bent and breath heavy. Can't encircle, can only grasp. Fingers not meeting, through denim. He puts a hand on my arm.

"We don't have to go any further. We can kiss. I'm okay. Are you okay?" he mumbles, turning my chin up. "Are you nervous?"

"Yes, a little," I breathe, but I've got his hipbone under my hand now, and I'm insistent.

"Do you want this?" I ask him.

He laughs, not a laugh. "Oh, _fuck_," he says. "I don't really need to answer that, do I? Yes, I do, but only if _you_ want this. Do you? Do you want me?"

I answer yes into his mouth, and he eases back, hands to his belt, eyes fixed on mine, then he's undoing buttons, pulling his jeans down and shoving them off his ankles. He's barefoot. He walked barefoot through the night sand to my door. Hesitates over his underwear - when he takes this off he'll be naked. It doesn't mean there's no turning back, but it means I'll have seen him. He's definitely not shy for his own sake, I sense, but he needs permission to expose me to a naked man. Move, closer, touch, his dick is sticking straight up, barely contained by the cotton anyway. Show yourself to me, Brown. I don't care if it's got polka dots, or it's solid silver. It might be, from the feel and weight and solidity. He's big. It's big. Him in my hand like this, another rush. I have to let go for a moment so that he can strip, but I reach again.

"Bella, Bella," and he's on me. Not frenzied, though - smiling, and stroking my face, and pushing my hair back tenderly, before his hand snakes down to my waist.

"These - what are they? These shorts. They're ridiculous, so thin. I love them. Take them off. Can_ I_?" He's a magician - they disappear.

And now there's very little between us. Kisses again, he licks my neck, we're face to face on our sides and he hasn't pulled me to him yet, I haven't pulled him to me yet. Little and weightless though my breasts are they dip weirdly at his angle, I know, but his touch on them is so full of blinks and wonder and open-mouthed appreciation that I could watch his eyelids as his eyes admire me. Only his eyelids don't occupy my attention for long when his dick is in my field of vision. My fingers measure him, and discover he's nearly the circumference of my wrist. Oh.

Now, he's quick to stretch to his jeans on the floor, searching for a pocket. You were right, Renee. He is responsible. And deft. Far quicker at taking care of that responsibility than I would be, because I would fondle him there as long as he would let me. Or would I? I want him, badly, and he's ready.

And he lets me have him. Pushes me over, slides a leg on top of me, an arm, mouth under my ear with teeth biting softly, then he moves and he's poised, my legs parted for him, and we need my hand to show him the way, this first time in the valley. He's so intent, he's careful and he's slow, softly cursing bit by bit, swearing inch by inch.

"Jesus."

"Christ."

"_Fuck_."

Right from the outset, he's been so gentle, opening me, no rush, no force, though I'm still nearly split apart.

"Do you feel good?" he whispers, all the way inside me in minutes that take hours.

I nod, almost on a sob, because everything about it feels sublime, mere "good" far too little for this enormity. The look on his face is almost the best thing of all. Pushing, both quietly noisy when he moves as I move, when he responds as I respond, when we meet. We, us, this.

I'm high and centered, and he grasps me by the ass, keeping us joined during his twisting descent to the mattress, lifting, flipping me to the top of us.

JB used to love it like this, because it didn't make him come and it didn't make me come. We could go on and on, until one of us got desperate - usually me. Then he'd turn us again, and do what he'd learned how to do, what we'd taught him. Ladies first.

Brown seems to love it too. I put my hands on his chest, leaning there to support my weight, and I'm so pleasure-seeking, slippery and full, I explore moving, backwards, forwards and around, fucking him as he groans, dark gaze moving between my breasts and face, and down to between us. Pushing up onto his hands, he's got his mouth at me, almost haphazardly tonguing my nipple while his elbows shake, until crashing back to the bed, resuming the blank-eyed staring. But he's not JB, and this is not like it's been in my past. Brown's built differently, perhaps his pubic bone is more prominent, or it's the angle of his erection, perhaps our puzzle pieces meet in different ways - oh, they definitely do. I'm not going to be able to go on and on like this at all. Mildly shocked to recognize the sensation about to engulf me, my gaze flickers back to his, to find him shocked too, and already glazing. He doesn't only know it's happening to me, it's happening to him.

"No. NO," hands suddenly clawing my hips, locking them so I can't move any more, his own thrust up so hard if he hadn't restrained me I'd have gone flying. His eyes unfocused, he's fierce and contorted, losing himself. I experience his orgasm as though it's mine. Every pulse. He's beaten me by seconds, but I still need him hard, I need him swollen and solid, and the hardness goes straight out of him. _No_.

Collapsed, muscles and cords that stood out now at ease, a bloom of heat across his chest, "Jesus, I'm sorry," panting, "Come here," "That wasn't supposed to happen."

Spread my knees more, dropping between them so my belly is on his. One of his hands around my head, the other shoving gently to straighten my leg so I'm lying properly, instead of forming this bridge over him. During my wriggling, I dislodge what was left of his penis. I'm _aching_ and now empty, thighs wanting to clench him.

"_Fuck_." "Oh, I'm really sweaty." "Bella, I'm so sorry," voice muffled, my hair in his face. The blood's all still concentrated in me, I'm still hot there, still expectant, still so _wanting. _Can I push my hips indecently into him? Try and get off?

He urges my face up, gives me tiny kisses full of sweetness, reaching under my body and over his to grasp the condom as I reluctantly take the cue to roll off. Murmurs, "Give me a minute, let me take care of this, and then I'll take care of you. I promise. Don't go anywhere."

I'm not, though he does. Pip's hall bathroom opens into the spare room too, an ensuite to be shared. No-one else needs the bathroom tonight, as Renee has her own, and our one guest, clothes-free, is using my door. Oh, _Renee_ - did she come home? I wouldn't have heard a freight-train. I wouldn't have heard the end of the world. I can hear my blood pounding in my ears, though.

"I promise," he said.

.

.

.

_hip to hip rockin' through the wilderness_ - the B52's

_earth's diurnal course_ - William Wordsworth


	16. Chapter 16

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

While he's gone I could finish this. Spectacularly. Thinking of the fit - him and me - I can feel it, shatteringly. The mismatch. He is wide where I am narrow - I could have died. I nearly did.

But I won't do what I could do, because, "I promise" he said. If he came back and found me touching me - how would he react? When JB saw my hand on myself, he went feral. His eyes would change color, he'd growl and watch and then attack, and my dance with the wolf would last an hour or more, with an impaling like a fireworks display. But Brown - no. What if he felt humiliated? Or hurt?

And, "I promise."

The more I wait, the further I am from the goal, the prize, the destination - but he's not long. As long as it takes, I suppose, to do whatever he's doing.

He walks back to me, and I haven't turned my lamp off. Naked. He's so truly beautiful. Big frame, but slender and long-limbed. Pale for a beach boy. Light twirl strands of hair across his chest, and darker down to his navel, circle-framing it, going on from there - that arrow to what is now innocuous and soft, but heavy enough, longish, thickish. He knows I'm looking, the peacock. But he's looking at me, too.

It's warm tonight. Every night, but especially tonight. I would have slunk under my coverlet for any other boy, on any other night, but Brown. Brown. His eyes get bigger as gets closer, and when he's next to the bed they're satellites, and they're frank and honest. They make me forget I feel thin. I think he actually _likes_ girls, despite his often silences and his occasional awkwardness. With his gentleness and his humor, with his kindness and his attention, and with his kisses and fucking, I think Brown may actually like _me_.

He climbs over the bedspread, sets his mouth at the un-named area between my neck and shoulder. Hands cold because he's just washed them, rough leg edging over my thigh, and breath feathering.

"Hey." Him. I tilt my head, lengthen my neck for him. He's nibbling.

"Hey." Me.

"Uh..." Me, with his fingers at my breast. Tongue at my mouth.

But Brown is not in a hurry, the way I am. His hand thinks it has all the time in the world. Bread dough, hours to rise.

"Just now," huskily -oh, the sound of him, like this - "I know it was all over too quickly. Forgive me, I disappointed both of us. I need to say - "

Pause. His breath stops. His hand stops. His hips were pressing, but they stop.

"I - I didn't expect it would feel like that." Pause.

"I didn't expect _you_ would feel like that." Pause.

"I had no idea you would _move_ like that and _look_ like that."

All statements punctuated with lips to my neck, then my chest, above my breasts, around them. He raises his head.

"Can I touch you?"

You'd _better._

Slips his hand further, mouth coming back to my gravity, tongue whisperfucking along the pathways, aureole but not nipple, so that I writhe trying to redirect him. He plays piano? Palm wide and fingers long. Oh. Finds an even gradient down my front, and his fingers encounter a forest of curls. I'm not a porn queen. It's all there, all me, and there's a discernible gulp. Then further. He's everywhere, ten, twelve or so square inches, whatever it is - he's there. He finds all of it, and he doesn't have a preference. He's all over the place. Slides internally - I feel him collecting wetness, and I hear him collecting wetness, from the shallows of me, stroking, caressing, until - Brown - hello? Um, not there. It's good, _really_ good, but could you just move your fingers a little further to the - you've done this before of course, right? Because you're everywhere, but a little focus would be good. Shall I show you? I want this. I _want_ this. He's bitten me lightly, the underside of a breast where Renee won't see, and his teeth are sharper than is polite. Quiet, panting noises verging on animalistic, his sucking will coax a mark. But his hand is strangely conservative, stroking with insistence, though almost aimless.

Brown? Things are getting urgent for me here, I need you to concentrate - but he's around and about, missing the point. It can't be. It can't be that he doesn't know where he's supposed to be right now. The way his mouth is, the way his body fucked me, what on earth is his hand doing? Push my hips, twist them, angle them, try with subtlety to nudge him where I want him to be, surge, urge - fuck! _Fuck._ Fish out of water now, I gasp and twist and twine under him, with the effort to get his touch where it has to be, gyrating against his hand, starting to whine and keen. He is whining and keening too, and against my hip I feel that he's hard again, hard and hard, and I'd tug him over and onto me, but - but. What is he doing? Do you know where the clitoris is? I could yell. With JB I came easily and often. With those other two guys I had sex with, orgasms weren't a possibility, and I didn't even care. My doctor has never mentioned a malformation. Down there everything is in perfect working order, and I'm frantic - Brown - _please_ - why are you kidding around like this? A praying mantis female bites off her lover's head, killing him. Brown has me so wound up with his imprecise caresses that I wouldn't go so far as decapitation but I'm ready to slap or smack him or howl or grab him - ready to - ready to shriek with frustration, but because of and despite his inexactness on me the build-up is happening. I'm maddened. His thighs are clenched around one of mine, dick thrusting, and he's grunting, gasping at me, hand so busy between my legs, slipping all over the cleft down there that's so exposed, so wet, so ready. I am not that much a curser, surely, but _Jesus, touch me_! His fingers slide in, they've been sliding in, not like his dick, not so blissful and completing, they're just not enough and I have never worked so hard in my life for these feelings. JB unerringly gave them to me. Brown - _Brown_ - BROWN - I stuff my knuckles into my mouth because I'm going to get so loud, to seize his hand, steer and instruct him, but now he's stroking my labia, too far south by so small a margin! Same rhythm, that's one thing I'll say for him, he's persistent even if he's wrong, but any second now I'm going to have to force him away and take charge and take control and take over, and then -

Krakatoa. For the first split second I don't believe it, and then on and on and wave after wave with his fingers plunged in me. I clench so _so_ I could snap them, and now they bend.

On and on. And on. He's half over me, holding me down, pinning me with his weight when I'd arc, levitate all the way off the bed, my silent screams rending the air. He's moving against me, pelvis fucking my hip in perfect synchronicity with the earthquake that's wracking me when he stops, jammed _hard_, breath sobbing. He lets out a guttural shout, and he's coming again, hot spurting against my skin, his face turned to the pillow to muffle the noise he's making. Oh. Oh. We're both shuddering, he eases away, but only very slightly, his mouth now against my neck while we try to restart breathing. My body is gripping his fingers, still shuddering, not stopping, and he doesn't withdraw them. Dampened skin all over, from perspiration - mine and his, and wet my side, sticky and warm, from him. I twist enough to be able to see him, and I'm _still_ clenching inside, languorous now. His eyes closed. He looks blissful. Rapturous.

"Hey." I murmur, blurry.

"Hey. Uh - I came on you."

"I came on you."

I still am, though milder now. Can you feel it?

"Yeah, you did."

He bestows a new smile, one I haven't seen, though there've been quite a few. This one is tired, sweet, unguarded, brimming with pleasure, and all mine. I've got one for him too, somehow making its way through astonishment and euphoric lassitude. I clear my throat.

"No-one's done that to me before."

"Uh?" still smiling sleepily.

Then, "_What_?" as he heard what I said.

"No-one's ever - ?" Self-correct. "Well, I mean they have, but - not quite like that."

Not very explicit, Isabella, but I don't want to say I thought he was fumbling, until I realized he wasn't. Until I realized he knew something that I didn't, that I would be sensitive_ every_where down in the pleasure-zone, not just the tiny part of it I'd confined my attentions to until now.

He's considering - "Did you like it?"

Mouth to his chest. "I haven't come back to earth yet."

Awestruck, really.

"Neither have I."

Quiet, while we orbit. I wonder if he realizes quite how much my life has changed, from having him in it. And further, from what he just did. Tell him, "I want to give you a medal. An award. A cup with your name engraved on it."

The smile becomes aloud. "Really?" Squeeze of his arms around me, brush of lips to my cheek. "Kisses will do. But I want to give _you_ a medal. No, a rosette. Most beautiful - oh, everything. Where do I start?"

Lips at my breasts. "These. There's only two of them, though. Not like those exhibits at the county fair."

Silly.

"Are you glad I don't have three?"

We're so sated and delighted and minutes away from falling asleep wrapped entwined entangled around one another.

"It would be entirely freakish if you had three but I wouldn't complain."

Clammy where we're in contact, he half pulls away, grimacing slightly at the mess tangling the hairs of his abdomen, smearing my hip. Grabs the t-shirt he'd dropped earlier and wipes the glisten from me first, then himself.

"Can I stay?"

I can't possibly, possibly say no, because I can't possibly, possibly let him leave. There would be a perilous and gnawing chasm in my heart big enough for the moon to fall into. And if the moon fell in - how dark would the night sky be? As dark as the pit of the chasm big enough to swallow the moon.

"Yes. Please do."

Anyway, he can't leave - our lower limbs are wound around one another's.

"Were you a boy scout?" I ask him.

"Never," he answers. "Why?"

"Left over right and under, right over left and through," I say. "Our legs are a reef knot."

He's too drowsy to respond with anything more than a nuzzle, he's too drowsy for anything. I'm aware two orgasms can really take it out of a guy - it sure happened with JB. I could melt at Brown's exhaustion, knowing.

During the night I'm aware we come unstuck, because he wakes me with a sigh, and hands reach, hands hold, he rolls into me, "Mmm, mm, mm," unintelligible. He's so out of it, does he even know who he's with? I know I do. He doesn't smell like anyone else.

"Mmm," his face rubs against my skin and his stubble is harsh and his hand tangles in my hair, even pulling it slightly, and the whisper from his throat is his name for me. My kissing name. The clock face reads nine-thirty when I can focus enough to be sure, and Renee has no particular time she expects me to be up by. She's always in the kitchen around now anyway. She thinks teenagers are night owls and morning sloths. I nudge Brown, wondering how things will be. After I've mentally measured his eyelashes - after I've visually traced his features, wishing my tongue could do it, and hello - what a sleepy blaze of green he's ensnared me with.

"How long have you been awake?"

"Half a minute."

"Half a minute. Have you been looking at me that whole time?"

This close - how could I prevaricate?

"Yes."

"I want to kiss you."

As soon as we move we unlock the scent of sex - we have that aroma to us. We had _sex_ last night. It's fucking_ intoxicating_. Emboldened, I pull at him and he starts rolling onto me, hard, and we freeze as we hear Renee singing. He laughs so much his whole body shakes.

"Guess we'd better face the music?" he asks. "Do you think she knows I'm here? Will she freak out?"

She might, but not in the way you think. She'll be delighted, trilling, "Oh baby - was he good to you?" right in front of him.

"No. She thinks you're great."

"Mmm. Do_ you_ think I'm great? Oh wait, after last night, you're probably reserving your opinion. Don't answer. I'm just - can I do this?"

I've ducked my head, but I have to lift it up again to see what he's asking. Oh, it's about kissing. His mouth, his lips, yes, you're great Brown. You're great, all right. Don't ever stop with this - and if your hands feel like heading back down... But no, Renee is only a matter of feet away. Brown and I give happy, happy kisses that don't deepen, we hug, we're so pleased at each other, and we have little teasing tickles, but we know we're getting up.

I'm in shorts and pulling on a top when he says, "Ahh - Bella?"

Back to him, fastening the clasps on my bra even though he saw my chest, well and truly, last night.

"Yes?"

He's looking down at himself dressed in the t-shirt he was wearing yesterday, black, and there are smudged, whitish marks on it. The shirt he wiped me with after he - we both start to laugh.

"I really can't appear in front of your mother wearing clothing that's covered in, well, jizz, for want of a better term."

It's not like Renee isn't going to know what it is. I mean, she's gonna know, surely. It certainly doesn't look like he dropped icecream down his front, or spilt a milkshake.

"Oh," I say, sadly. "I guess not."

"I should go."

He doesn't look in the least inclined to go anywhere. Pulls me to him, so tall, and I rise like a ballerina to wind my arms loosely round his neck. Would like to hold him much, much tighter. Want to hold him like I did last night, inside me. I tell him that with my mouth to his, and my hips to his. His hands drop to my backside in some kind of microsecond, as he presses in to show he's ready for me again. Don't go home, Brown, stay here and do this.

"I should go," he says again. I don't agree, and I don't nod. I don't nod. I'm not relinquishing my grip and neither's he.

"What are you doing today?"

Daydreaming and touching myself, of course.

"Going ice-skating."

He's so startled, I don't know how I keep a straight face.

"_Really_?"

"Yeah, that's this morning, and this afternoon, sky-diving."

Oh, he's onto me after that absurd claim, and his smirk could strip layers off the veneer of me, the thin veil of shyness and decorum holding in place preventing me ripping that t-shirt right off him. It'd look a loss worse to Renee in shreds, with scratches and bites showing clear through to his skin underneath. Clear through to his_ bones._

"Can I come sky-diving with you?"

"Actually, I'm kind of not really doing anything," apart from the self-love, which I would happily forego for more time with him.

"Can I do not really anything with you?"

Decorum doesn't preclude up and to and in, mine against his, lips, chest, belly, body.

"I'd like that."

"Okay. Good."

He doesn't say when, although strictly speaking he doesn't really give himself the chance, or I don't give him the chance, depending on whose tongue went into whose mouth first. Left over right and under, right over left and through. It's a simple knot, yet binding, though it doesn't hold him. He steps through my window.

"Hello, good morning, what a lovely day, pesto eggs?" Renee asks me in the kitchen, gazing expectantly over my shoulder. "You must be hungry!"

It's not me she's so pleased to see, but over my shoulder there's no-one.

"Bo?" she asks sharply in a minute or two, with still no manifestation of an other.

"Pesto eggs sounds great."

"Where's Edward? Is he in the bathroom?"

"Ah, no. He went."

How did she know he was here?

"He _went_?" Oh boy, she looks cross. "After last night, he _went_?"

She _is_ cross. And what does she mean? To my questioning look she answers, "Oh, I heard him, Bo. I think everyone in town heard him, as well as half the hinterland, and several ships at sea. And after _that_, he couldn't stay for breakfast?"

I'm so embarrassed she heard us, but she's not. She's_ very_ disapproving, however, at the knowledge that Brown left.

"He wanted to change his clothes," I explain, hoping it doesn't sound lame, hoping she doesn't think what her expression says she thinks. That he used me, and cleared out once he got what he wanted. It wasn't like that. It absolutely wasn't like that.

"... change his clothes?..." chop chop, cucumber on the block, "...better show his face around here pretty damn quickly..."

I wince a little. I don't know when he's coming back, he didn't say. Chop. Green apple. "...he made a booty call..."

A booty call? Oh God, no he didn't. Did he? The blender is louder than her mutterings, though way quieter than her censure, and perhaps around the same volume as my sudden prickle of uncertainty. He and I spent the day together! Then he went home for dinner. Then he came back to see me! A friendly visit, at eleven clock at night, with a condom in his back pocket, although he'd said the day before he didn't take it for granted that I'd sleep with him. Perhaps he did though. But what about afterwards? And what about this morning? You don't kiss and kiss like that if you're trying to make a quick getaway. He'd kept a promise he'd come back to my bed, but he hadn't actually promised he'd come back to my house.

"We've got plans for later," I hear myself say, though they weren't definite. Now I sound like I'm trying to convince myself. Am I? My mother has jumped to a conclusion that couldn't possibly be correct, could it? She wants it to be true, about the later plans, handing me a beaker full of frothing, gooey light green.

"This is for replenishment," she says, darkly. It has a strange consistency. "Almond meal."

_I_ want it to be true. Wander over to the table, ultramarine glowing on it from through the pane, sparkling, dazzling. Renee rinses blades and other removable parts of appliances and finishes her clatter. She's taking herself down the hall while I wonder what the horizon is, and how far away it is, and why it's not a fixed point, and where it is in relation to me, and why it will always recede when approached. It's there and I'm here, and as long as I don't move it won't either, as though it's waiting. Are we always waiting? Do we ever just be? Am?

Then I hear a sound and though it's almost no sound at all I turn my head to see Renee's unspoken guess was wrong. Clean-shirted but still wet from a shower, he must have rushed, he must have run, Brown is far nearer than the horizon, and closing. Rise, take the two or three steps to the door, I reach out, he reaches in, and he's kissing me before he speaks. Our smiles mean our lips are stretched and our teeth bash together so we have to kiss with our tongues - my mouth just won't pull itself into a kissing shape, no matter how I instruct it to, because this is surely and easily the lovliest kiss I've ever had. Brown came running to me. He's still outside, I'm inside, both of us poised on the threshold, on the doorstep, on the brink.

A not-so-discreet cough behind us.

"Bo-bo, why don't you stop blocking the door and let Edward come in? He might be hungry. Pesto eggs, Edward? A nice _replenishing_ smoothie?"

Oh, she loves him now. Perhaps I do, too...

.

.

.


	17. Chapter 17

Six WeeksThanks everyone who's written in about ch 16. I don't know what happened on ffn. There are words missing all the way through the chapter - and I even deleted it from document manager about seven hours ago, straight after I posted it but it's still there!I'll sort it out as soon as ffn lets me.

... lapse of quite some time...

I got it sorted. But I haven't deleted this chapter because then all the numbers would be out and I'd get confuzzled and probably make some sort of awful mistake trying to get them right... so I'm leaving this for the time being.

So what I'm saying, basically, is you can ignore me, and keep reading. Please. Thank you


	18. Chapter 18

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

Turns out, Brown is very hungry. Ravenous. He eats the pesto eggs and looks ready to eat anything that can't get up and run away, and Renee gives me a very meaningful look as she pours him one of her special, life-enhancing drinks. For replenishment of what? I could ask her, but what if she says something embarrassing? I'm certain she will. I can guess what she means.

Brown reveals a further mother-pleasing side to himself and does the clearing up. The dish-washer stacking. Even the skillet Renee used for the eggs. He makes coffee, and he's every bit as good at it as I am, his coffee is delicious. He is delicious. Renee's approval is warmth I bask in, his back to us as he labors at the sink. He can make love to her daughter, so loudly he disturbs the peace in this quiet beachside town, if he performs household tasks, is the unspoken edict. Really? No, he can make love to her daughter if he makes her daughter happy. I'm happy, lunatic and lovestruck. Unlucky too and doomed because the hard, cold concrete fact is that he inhabits this summerside place and I don't. Here is my unreality, my suspension, my brief and terminating removal from the every day of work, school, home, nutshell. Renee and I are spending time in a movie, and the end credits will soon roll. But we have a while yet.

"Well, you two, lovely as it is to sit around and chat I have things to do this morning. I've sent photos of Hal to that sweet girl Tyla at the photographic store, and she's enlarging them for me, and I've spoken to Mr Ninety's son Jim at the framing place in the market, so now I'm going to go and choose frames. It'll be a present for Pip, a lovely portrait of Hal and one of him and Suzy - so I need to get it all sorted. I'll be about an hour."

Renee is leaving me and Brown, Brown and me alone together. It's a license, an endorsement. It's approval and condoning. You know, don't you mother, that the second you're out the door he and I will make like bunnies? Glance at him, and there is no mistaking, no missing the flare. No missing it from me either. You could find the two of us if we were lost at sea from what we must be emanating.

"Actually, I'll be two hours. Two hours." She glances at the clock over the kitchen sink. "_Two hours_."

Renee is someone who likes to leave parts of the house tidy enough that she doesn't come home to a mess, but Brown has tidied. She approaches the counter-tops with a cloth and they're already clean. Table-top - sparkling. Cutlery, crockery, dealt with, thanks to the diligence of Brown, and the food preparation area looks like it's in a show-home. She'd think nothing of books open, pencils and scraps of paper about, but the kitchen should be immaculate, and is.

And so she departs, me walking her to the door, a quick hug, "Bedside cabinet," she whispers. Oh, my mother is my enabler. What if it was heroin I wanted and not a man? Would she supply me with requirements so easily? No. She's a romantic. Not a pusher, feeding an addiction. So sparse is the knowledge of her that I've gleaned through the years of my growing up, yet this I know - she has no time for drugs or alcohol. No time for artificial highs - but Renee believes utterly in feelings and emotions, and trusting the self. She supported my involvement with JB, and nursed me when it finished - now it seems she will fly a flag for Brown. My father died when they were both young, and to my knowledge she's had no significant encounters since him, so my bereft mother, knowing only a daughter's love, will support me. I'm quiet as she's at the front door, thinking of this, and I hug her briefly, tight.

After a polite, "Thank you for the breakfast," Brown has hovered at a distance. I close the door behind Renee and turn to face him. I could jump on him from here. It's about eleven o'clock in the morning, and Spanky sits in Hal's basket, conversations and happenings occur elsewhere everywhere while stars burn brightly and fade, birds sing and worms turn, and Brown is about three yards away. His hair is damp. He wears a grey and black checked shirt that he looks very good in, but he'd look better out of. He swallows. I'd like a closer look at his eyelashes. I could be anywhere and I'd want to be on him right now, but from here it will take little or no effort. I jump.

He catches me, with a laugh and an oomph, and he hadn't come here this morning for sex, but that's what he's going to get. That's what I'm going to get. Take your clothes off.

Smiling, laughing, grinning, I was shy until I had a taste of two nights ago, until I realized the absoluteness of the word, the label, the concept of _finite_. Me and Brown are Finite. This day, this moment, won't come again. I could be gawky and blush and stammer - the Isabella who's afraid to want him - but inside me there is something fearless and irrefusable. If Brown can only be mine for a brief now - today and a few more todays, I want everything. We nearly topple over. We do topple over. Luckily the sofa is behind him and the cushions save us. We've got two hours, and I'm going to spend most of them taking his lips, being in them. He's on his back, his legs wide, and I'm on his front between them, drugged and delirious and eyes closed. Fuck, he's jutting hard against my belly and soft against my mouth. We're in sympathetic undulation until he breathes, "Your room?"

So tricky to walk when someone is jammed behind you, arms in a hipclamp, tongue to the back of your neck, thighs locked to yours, breath in hot laughing, and you trying not to break a single inch of the contact. I arch and push back and we could do this right here, in the hall, my hands splayed to Pip's unsullied wall, him heaving against me. Gauge his response, and his hands tell me he likes it, he wants it, he loves it. Really, Brown? Right here, standing? I will if you will, but he slides past and ahead, fingers twining into mine and we fall, tumble slow motion into the warm haven we've not been long out of.

"This - this - what are they for? Bra? Panties? Why?" he says, pulling at my clothes, hasty. I'm doing it to him, too. Baring him. Baring me. We're slithering together like a pair of otters and he's so joyously vocal in the freedom of mother-absence. Can't stop smiling, at this stage, although the smile turns to something resembling stupification when I manage to slide underneath him and lick at his dick from the base to the tip, learning the texture of veins close to the surface, and the swollen heavy ridge down his underside. I've just opened my mouth around one of his balls, tongue discovering, but I'm not allowed to proceed.

"Oh, _don't_," he mutters, pulling me by the shoulders, getting me up high on him so he can find my nipple. He puts both hands at one of my breasts, thumbs and fingers spread, lips to me like I'm a musical instrument. Then I'm on my back, he's kneeling, fingers seeking, probing, and his eyes don't see the way his fingertips do. I love the way his fingers see. Hot and firm, confident. Messy and wet and all over the place, which I know now can end me. I know what can end him. We can find different endings too if we have the patience.

I shimmy around over him to twist for the drawer next to my bed, and the items Renee left, and I tear the wrapping off. Brown shudders as I put the little circle in my mouth, and then bend to take him where he's so hard, like a spear, like a javelin. I've never actually done this before, put on a condom this way, it's just something I saw suggested in a magazine. I have no skill and he has to help. When I next see his eyes, his brain has left the planet. My hands are circling him, my mouth too, though he feebly but insistently pushes at me to get off him.

"Seriously," he mumbles, as I ease back a little. "I am nowhere _near_ ready for you to do that. Any of that. Tell me something boring. Please."

I slide back up his chest. Skin. Skin. His hair abrasive where I'm smooth. Sending me high. My mouth at his, delving, diving, sinking as he raises his to meet me. All I could tell him is how right this feels, and I don't need words to pull him over me, spreading, opening, inviting him in. He takes the plunge. He's loud again, like he can't help it. He's gorgeous, forceful and helpless and intense, and he's attentive.

"Tell me, what's good? Bella, what do you like? Do you like this?" Variations in angle and pressure and speed. Oh, I like it all right. If he's careful I'll come all over his dick, hard. If he's not careful I'll come all over his dick, hard. As long as he gives me enough, it's a certainty.

"My hands," I tell him.

"Wha - ?" he pants back.

"Hold them."

I've raised my arms over my head. He bites his lip and reaches with both hands for mine. This brings him flat on top of me, his full weight crushing me, and with my arms out of commission I use my legs to urge and guide. Both groaning, and I'm wild under there, wanting this, _wanting_ this. Thrashing beneath him as he grunts and keeps going, holding on for me, my feet flat on the mattress so I can push up. When I bite him, the breath hisses out of him like he's been punctured, and then I feel myself detonate, the impact and the concentric circles, the tremors and quaking, while he's still moving. He lifts his head to stare wildly at me, almost confused, and then the shock hits him too, lost to sensation and pulsing dizziness. Neither of us speak. My first thoughts are incoherent, swirls of fleeting rapture, then counting down. Elation gives way to numbness, though I resist. This is finite, and decreasing.

Then after, time's elasticity in extension, not pulling in tight. Suspended, langorous, skin is sand-dunes for the wandering, let neither tides nor seasons have dominion, never let me go.

His index finger lightly at my breast, he's recovered first.

"Does this tickle?"

Mmm. "No. It's nice. What are you doing?"

"Drawing circles. A target."

"Like for archery?"

"No. For my tongue." Demonstrates.

"Your aim is very good."

"It should be at this range. Probably just as good from further away. When I know what I'm aiming for."

"What's your favorite sport?"

"Squash. Not the version Bear plays, I like the version you and I played just now. I squashed you a bit, didn't I? I hope you're all right. You can squash me any time you like. You can do anything to me any time you like."

Pause. "So you're into everything."

Considers. Smirks. "Um - maybe not bestiality. I don't fancy that much."

"No? I though you liked animals? Do you have a favorite animal?"

He growls a little. "You."

Oh, we're sated and delirious and close and I'd lick him and eat off him and never get up and go anywhere, and the hot damp impression of his limbs against mine will stay with me.

"What's your favorite place?"

"You."

My smile is growing, commensurate with my heart. Can you feel my ribs expand, your head on them as it is?

"What's your favorite song?"

"You."

"What's your favorite color?"

Brown, you're so silly and I'm so silly. Silly together.

"Pink."

Oh? Not what I might expect. "Honestly? What shade?"

Finger to my nipple again, twirling. "_This_ shade. Any pink that's a part of you. I want to go looking for some more."

And he does, sliding sliding down, using his tongue, finding what he's after, although I have to stop him.

"What's wrong?" he asks, frowning.

Oh, nothing's wrong at all, except I've lost my bones. I have no idea where any of them could possibly be, but what he's doing is far too good and I'm not going to last, and I want us to be joined. I wave my hand wordlessly at the drawer, and he says, "Oh, yes," and wraps himself in the latex, then in me. The size and feel of him is still so unexpected, so good, so right. This, this, so _right_.

Twenty minutes before Renee's ETA, and Brown and I are sitting demurely on the deck, under the umbrella, working on a crossword and writing the answers. On paper. We had a shower together, him not being able to keep his hands off me; me in my entirely new disinhibition, loving to have his hands everywhere. Oh, and mine on him. I can't come standing up - he learns this. He can, though his knees give way and he leans heavily on me, sighing. I wouldn't let him go, and he didn't want me to. His third time this morning.

Perhaps relieved to see us respectable - who knows? - Renee sings out a greeting and comes to sit down.

"Guava juice?" "I picked out some lovely frames. Jim goes around yard sales and thrift stores picking up all sorts of eclectic things." "The pictures are going to be really special." "What have you two been up to? Never mind. What are you doing this afternoon?"

Brown and I haven't talked about this afternoon. We've just talked about wanting each other's bodies. He might be busy this afternoon - I don't even know.

"Um - the market?" I say-ask, ask-say.

Nods.

"Jasper's taking Suzy to see Alisha. If she's going to be there."

Oh, the pathos. Poor Blond - I don't know how he's doing, I've been so caught up in myself. I'll ask Brown when we're on our own again.

Blithely, my mother, "Yes, Alisha will be there. I'm meeting her and Esme for a rose tea. Other than that, I'm going to have a quiet day, though. I found a preview copy of Pip's book lying around, and since she'll be back in a few days I thought I should read it. Then I can tell her how good it is," Renee remarks.

Brown doesn't say anything, I don't say anything. An indirect mention of our upcoming separation is a little too much for me, though I don't know what it means to him.

"Her book might not be any good at all," Renee continues. "I mean, it's called 'A Journey Around My Heart.' It sounds like some ghastly self-discovery tale. 'Oh, I was young and naive and then I had an epiphany and now I'm wise.' Well, I shouldn't judge before I've read a single line, should I? How about I walk up with you to the square, and then what happens happens? We'll catch up later, Bo-bo, when you get home. What shall we do about dinner? Oh, don't let me forget, I told Jim I'd take him some sour strawberry sauce..."

Not needing an audience any longer, Renee performs her checklist, and Brown and I stand up. Neither of us have ever so much as alluded to my imminent departure, and we don't now. We go to the town centre, with Renee chattering between us, and we go to Alisha. Today a sparrow. Little brown sweater, little brown skirt, with her hair combed tightly against her head and tortoiseshell spectacles. Such a contrast. She's such a chameleon.

"Renee! Isabelle! Edward!" warm and sincere. "Look!" Showing us ceramic vases in dazzling white, no shades, no patterns. Not her usual style. "Aren't they basic? They don't need to be colorful or complicated. They're for flowers, after all. Flowers don't need competition or embellishment. Flowers are everything in their own right," she informs us.

Next to her, Makendra wears a leather cap and a leather bustier. When she stands and leans over her trestle table to greet us, I see she's attired in some sort of hooped skirt frame, without the skirt. Hoops from hip to ankle, all attached to one another by canvas straps. Beneath the hoops, white bloomers to her knees, black stockings, and button-up black boots. I admire her so much I could die for her. A man is talking to her, and she has interrupted him to greet us.

"You were saying?" she turns back coolly.

"My name is Aron. I am a director," he says. "Not Hollywood. I despise Hollywood. Overpaid giftless egocentrics with perfect teeth. I work in underground theatre and cinema. I won't make you famous, or rich. I will make you an _artiste_. I'm not interested in beauty. Beauty is boring. I'm moved by character, and an Amazon in Victorian underwear has character most people would find bizarre. I don't give a shit about most people. I seek out the unusual and I find a niche for them and I carve their name in letters across the sky a mile from top to bottom. Have you ever done any acting?"

"Every day," Makendra says.

"Indeed? Take my card."

From nowhere, Makendra produces a monocle, screwing it to one eyesocket and squinting at the card the man proffers. He makes a sound that's almost a choke.

"Too special! I'm not letting you get away. Let me introduce you to someone."

He turns, wheeling on the heel of one foot, calling, "Zaf!"

Brown's amused, Makendra looks bored, I'm waiting, and the little guy shrugs and says, "He keeps his own sweet time. To quote CS Lewis, he's not a _tame_ lion."

Seconds later a lanky boy approaches in a white tank top and low, baggy jeans, hands in pockets, insouciante. Hair blue-black, combed back at the sides with flopping bangs on top. Thin arms covered in ink. He shambles up to Makendra and Aron, and me, and looks up. Oh. Eyes a blue you've never seen and mouth a kiss you've yet to have. He's so sexy it's outrageous.

"Yeah?" he drawls lazily, then he sees Mak.

"How do you think Makendra here would fit in with our little coterie?" Aron asks expectantly.

Zaf narrows his gaze.

"A clothes horse. Does she have any ability? She'll probably photograph well, as long as someone tells her what her attitude should be."

Smooth look at Aron, Mak says, "That's your talent pool?"

"Zafron is a playwright. His work is visionary and his talent prodigious. I'm casting at the moment for his latest work. Give me your email, I'll send you the script, and if you like it you can read for us. There is a part you would be perfect for. Zaf, did you already see the magnificent Makendra in a dream? How else could you have written for her?"

"I don't write for anyone," dismissive, almost derisive reply.

Zaf is rude, Makendra has been approached a thousand times before by no-hopers who think she is stunning, and Aron is quite possibly a fraud. Amidst the half-moment of stalemate, the frolicking tumult that is Suzy arrives, Blond in tow. Suzy makes the fuss over Alisha that Blond would probably like to. She sidles alongside Alisha, rubbing sensuously, and turning up her face for kisses. Alisha is pleased, Blond is tortured, Makendra looks like she thinks Zaf is a bug, Zaf appears listless, and Aron looks like he's about to hand a card to Suzy as well.

Brown snorts.

"Oh, fuck, let's go," his hand at my hip until we're side by side on a park bench adjacent to the square, huddling like two naughty kids with a secret.

"Wasn't that a circus? We can go back in half an hour for act two, if you like. Meantime - tonight? Movie at the Comcen?" he asks, nudging me. He doesn't seem to care who might see us. Hasn't seemed to care all day. We've drawn some fond looks, from people who must have known him all his life.

"I don't know. What are they showing?"

"Mmm. I'm not sure it matters. There's a factor we need to take into consideration. The community centre has a strictly enforced no pda ruling for the duration of the screening."

"Oh."

He's smirking, I'm wriggling. He's trying to get his hand into the back pocket of my jeans. I'm trying to let him, but they're tight.

"Apparently it's distracting when someone might be concentrating on subtleties and nuance and plot and whatever, and right next to them some steamy couple are getting down with a bit of tongue yoga."

"I don't see why that should bother anyone, as long as it's not too groany."

"I agree. But anyway, let's not go. Because I'd want to put _your_ hand here - " takes my hand and puts it right on his crotch. In broad daylight - "and _my_ hand here..." slipping his fingers along the inside seam of my jeans, not in the direction of my knees..."and we'd get thrown out of the movie."

"We'll get thrown out of the market," I return, with a light squeeze that makes him blink.

"Uh. I think it's time we left, anyway. My place? Your place?" Walking backwards, holding my waist. Then a worried, "Oh, I'm assuming you want to spend some more time with me. You might have other plans..."

Sentence left hanging. I'm not a mind-reader - how could I be? - but in his unfinished statement, in his pleading look, in everything he's been and said and done today, I can read that he doesn't want me to have other plans. Oh, God, I'm so available. So unoccupied. So easy.

"I have a karate lesson tonight at eight o'clock."

"Mm? No, you don't."

"Yeah. I learn karate for suppleness."

"You're plenty supple."

"Because of the karate."

"And is the karate lesson before or after the sky-diving?"

"Before. The sky-diving is after dark. More fun that way."

He stops smiling."Are you teasing me? I'm pretty sure you don't have a karate lesson. Or do you? I can't tell."

I'm not teasing. I just don't want him to think I'm a tragic loser, with nothing at all in my life. I want him to think that I choose him over other options, not that I have nothing else to do.

"Okay, no karate or sky-diving."Pulls me close.

"Let's go to the beach, then," he says in my ear. "Let's swim."

"_Now_? I don't have a swimsuit."

"In your underwear. It's perfectly respectable, I've seen it. _Too_ respectable, really. No, it's perfect. Actually - how about I get my car and we'll go down the coast, swim, have dinner, and then come back tonight?"

Message Renee and tell her. "Mind the sand - it gets in," she sends back. Renee.

Dinner first - he pays for it, then I buy us ice creams as we sit lazily on a seawall, still light, still light-headed, still warm, silly, happy, horny, crazy.

Once we're in the water, he doesn't have much interest in swimming. He wants to make out, and he wants to do what he started at the market, which had no chance of conclusion there. Here, no-one's to know what is taking place under the swell's shifting surface, between my thighs, between his. It doesn't really work for me, although it feels good. It works for him though. We're chest-deep in warm sea water and I feel the pulsing, feel him quivering, moaning into my neck as his release escapes into the swirling sea. Wet and laughing in his car on the way back, he gets me home, gets me inside, and I know he's going to get me off.

Renee's there, yes, but she must have gone to bed. Brown and I do the same, and he reaches again. He doesn't know yet it's all about his dick for me, not his fingers, not his mouth. It's not about coming, it's about him in me. The connection, the completion, the fit, his body warm and solid, moving. The smell of him, the sounds of him, the size and the stretching and the in and out. His cock. Would he understand me if I said so? I lie on my side, leg thrown back over his, hips open wide for his touch, hand on his dick at first to show him the way, then on his hip to regulate him. Assertive, I'm rolling backwards into him and making him pay attention. He gives in to me completely, until he decides to change positions, and somehow keep us locked, both on our knees, him behind.

"Oh, Jesus, you're beautiful," he mutters, and then it starts. Again. Again.

Brown has said he needs to work in the morning and he has chores, and this and that, all with his mouth leaving wet trails as though a snail's been on me, and I want to make him breakfast. Eggs and sourdough, and he's voracious again. I love it. His appetite is sexy, and knowing that he's this hungry because the demands of my body are depleting him is even sexier. I'd crawl under the table and suck on him if I didn't think that Renee could appear at any momnet.

She does. She stands at the door. There's something about her - an air, a stillness, intuitable. Something's up. Big.

"You know I love you?" to me, as though Brown isn't even there.

For the answer - actually I wasn't sure of it when I was younger, but getting older and gaining insight into the enigma and quirkiness of my mother I did think that she did, albeit in a different way to other mothers. Lately I've been certain.

"Yes."

"You're everything to me," she says urgently, still at the door. "Bo-bo, I deeply regret certain things that happened, but I can't ultimately be completely sorry, because I got you."

I have no idea what she might be saying, but Brown pushes his chair back and stands.

"I'll call," he promises, dropping a swift kiss to my mouth, and saying goodbye to Renee, who barely nods.

After the footfalls recede, after a quiet that stretches, with her unblinking and perturbed, me wary, I see, I actually _see_, decision, commitment, conviction as she chooses words.

"I've avoided this your whole life, but now it's time. We need to talk."

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Oh I just uploaded this and had a look back and the formatting is all to hell again. Sorry. Someone suggested I try firefox but I don't know how to do that. Help?

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I just checked again, and it seems to be all right, although it's centered itself. I'm too tired to check it thoroughly though - it's one a.m. I'll hope for the best and have another look tomorrow. Nighty-night!


	19. Chapter 19

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

So, my mother - enigma extraordinaire, ever-present but unreachable keeper of the secret of my existence - wants to talk.

"I hardly know where to start," she says tautly. "Perhaps I should just give you this."

Hands me the copy of Pip's book. Pip's book? She wants to talk about Pip's book - and she's this serious?

"By the way," she adds, "It's not a novel. It's not fiction."

Slips away, nothing further. No wonder I'm self-contained.

I make myself comfortable, couch and cushions, breeze aloft and filtered airy light, and begin.

The narrator has just finished school and is embarking on his/her life. Use of the pronoun, always, and the gender is unannounced. Since Pip wrote it, however, I'm reading it as I, me, being female. Right from the outset is the feeling, alluded to and yet unvoiced, that something has recently gone wrong. The narrator had a Plan A and no Plan B, so sure was she of her trajectory after high school. But whatever happened has left her floundering, flapping, uncertain and grasping, and she tells us she spends years in this state.

More than one of those years in her hometown proves too many and she leaves, unclear as to whether she's striking forth boldly or fleeing. Unable to settle, unable to forge bonds, unable to stop hurtling, she travels. Always unexplained, the source of her discontent. Eventually, somewhere she stops, finding a permanent address, enrolling in an accounting course, and qualifying. Having enjoyed words throughout school, her ability lies with numbers, and they provide more surety of income. Counting, balancing, adding, off-setting - she sees herself as dull, thinks she left behind spark and luminosity both geographically and psychologically. Resigned, she expects no sparks or fever. She takes a dull job, settles to a dull life.

Her language, though, is not dull. Well - it is, but not to begin with. Skillfully, Pippa has condensed the narrator's vocabulary and voice as she has condensed her horizons. The story starts lost and upset, but full of recently unmet hope, then sinks slowly, with less words, less color, less, less. It becomes hard to read in the growing bleakness, but compelling because of it. Pip captures dislocation and atrophy as her narrator dislikes her occupation, and feels alienated in her town. She meets people she shares no connection with. She accepts invitations to parties where the conversation deadens her - and goes on empty dates, having automaton sex with men she finds boring and for whom she feels nothing. Somehow, it's easier for her to fuck than to kiss anyone. Kissing seems more intimate and more expressive - fucking is purely genital, not requiring that she give much of herself, and after the meaningless fucking she can walk away. Kissing is more like a promise. She mourns the fullness and excitement she had anticipated stepping from youth to adulthood and she remembers when she thought there would be more.

Not a quitter though, she goes on the move again before the stultification of this life can engulf her, though it's taken years to get to that realization and stage. Colleagues express surprise, since she is regarded as successful, but she has a craving for richness and variety, and these are in short supply where she finds herself. She'd made wise investments, she'd bought low and now she sells high, and she uproots again. This time, a more considered choice of a stopping point. Her training is in balances and ledgers and predictability and the absolute - and her character is in these too, but for the gentle imperative "_dream_". The imperative that sings songs from her memory.

The new place is leagues away from where she was before. Or is it? Maybe she's just leagues away herself. There is enough money lining her bank account that she doesn't have to work for a while, and she finds that the world outside of accounting is an unknown place. This world, here, in her new town of residence, at any rate. Conversation doesn't resolve around the stock market and real estate. The locals are welcoming and warm. The pace is slower, and easier. Grounded. No seventy-hour weeks. It takes months to settle in, but she learns to actually cook meals from scratch, instead of throwing frozen packages in the microwave. She learns the color of natural light, instead of the color of artificial lighting inside an office for ten hours a day. She learns you can discuss the weather as something that actually matters, rather than as a trivial nicety. Here the weather is important, she discovers. Rediscovers. It matters because people walk, exposed to the elements, and because people grow things. Value exists everywhere outside of a figure at the bottom of a column. Value exists that doesn't involve numbers and decimal places. She plants tomatoes, because all the neighbors seem to have planted tomatoes, but hers are on the wrong side of the house, and she only gets to eat half a dozen before one hot day destroys all the rest, and damages the plants beyond recovery. Even apparent negative value - in other words loss - is worthwhile, because she has learned something.

And she always knew she wasn't funny, wasn't charismatic, was a little too straightforward to be good company, but she has been invited out for dinner by someone she met - and she tells the tomato saga.

"Hmm," her hostess says, considers, informs, advises. "You need a shade structure. Not opaque - semi-permeable. Leave it with me, I'll think of something. Between us, we'll get your tomatoes happening. You'll have napoletana sauce coming out of your ears. If at first you don't succeed, and if it's something you actually want - sigh, try, fly again - that's what I say."

The shade structure happens - wood, gauze - so easy. The narrator hadn't really known that women could fix things, and build things, and engineer things. Juicy, plump, perfect tomatoes, sun-screened. If something goes wrong, you consider it, you come up with a possible solution, and you try it out.

The narrator looks back at what she considers her lost years, which have been her entire life since school, and looks to their onset. Something went wrong. Thinks, considers, for a very long time. Can she fix it? That depends. Who is she? What is she? These are questions she has been asking herself and avoiding simultaneously. She's still not sure, though answers jump out. They disappear just as rapidly. None quite fit.

But counting backwards, recollecting. Looking at the yearbook from way back then. It would be nice to catch up with some friends from school. Five years, ten years, more - what has everyone been up to? Careers? Marriages? Children?She gets onto the internet and sends emails, does some hunting around. Replies come in from across time, state-wide, nation-wide, world-wide. _Wow - fancy hearing from you! What's up? Bet you're a really in-demand accountant by now! Hey - got any kids? Where are you living?_

Sifting through all these, we find that there's only one reply she's interested in, and it takes some time before it arrives. She has to send several bulk emails to track down the address. When she gets it she takes a deep breath, though she had been preparing herself mentally for this moment for months. For years. Be still, my beating heart! She picks up the phone, wills herself to still the tremble. Dials.

"Hello?"

...

By this time, I'm hooked, and I want to know what's going on. The chapters about the accounting job were thankfully short, because they were so dry, but that just showcases Pippa's adeptness with words. Once she started roaming again, the language grew in adjectives and adverbs, becoming conversational and descriptive.

I guess my mother wants me to know a bit more about her friend, this Pip, who will be arriving home in a few days; who I've only met the once - when I arrived here to help look after her house and her dog. I didn't do too well there, as her precious and loyal companion died under my care - Hal the Magnificent, now laid to rest.

Pippa calls me Iz-bo - a term of endearment I'm not sure I deserve, as a dog-killer. Oh, and I've been fornicating like a demon under her roof, which is something I don't know whether I need to confess to, and I don't know if she'd have a problem with. I don't know much, really, considering that Renee hasn't filled me in on anything. From the expansive account before me, Pippa sounds like someone who's straighty-one-eighty and thinks they might be missing out because they lack angles. So where do we go from here?

Back to the book, which has been divided into part two. Straight away, I see the second part is set before the first.

Preschool - a bunch of little kids. All a bit fuzzy - sand and chocolate, crayons and dancing. Emerging gradually, the narrator is a serious child who one day makes a friend - a garrulous, quirky girl found challenging by the other kids. This girl has four braids instead of two, her socks are different colors, she makes up her own words to the songs they all know.

"You like _her_? She's weird," the other kids say, but yes, the narrator does like _her_. It's not quite fair that this other child suffers any exclusion because one day she might wear ballet shoes instead of normal shoes, and because her satchel doesn't feature any of the merchandising they all know and love, already. Her schoolbag - gasp! - has the paintmarks of tiny little fingerprints, as though she'd decorated it herself. Difference. Creativity. Splendor and glory and pain - the potential is there, fallow and burgeoning in the little new girl, and no child reared on commercial channels has seen it before.

"My family doesn't have tv," the girl admits all a-puzzle, and "I don't know about that stuff," when quizzed relentlessly about the lack of recognizable brands on her attire and in her conversation.

And on, through the years. The girl always sidelined, and the narrator defending and advocating for her, because injustice isn't fair. This girl threatens ordinary kids by being so bright and unconstructed, and some teachers dislike her, some teachers love her. It isn't an easy run. The narrator gets down to work and studies, completes all her assignments, obeys all the rules, and is exemplary. Then she turns to help her odd and wayward friend, who has drawn pictures in the margins and spelled phonetically, and who knows bigger words than any of their classmates. Her adoptee is sensitive, walking a constant tripwire; distracted by a cloud, undone at a fallen birdsnest.

And things even out. It's a long dip in the water from preschool to high school. The two girls are still allies, still close. Swapping plans for after school, after university - architecture, design, theatre for the one; economics for the other. Oh, the narrator has the hard-earned marks for law or medicine, but secretly she longs to be swept on the tide of her friend's color and imagination and buoyancy. Take me with you, I'll be your support, your ground crew.

There's a party - New Year's Eve. They both have blind dates, set up through some dubious network of girly-girls who always wear lip-gloss and push-up bras, and have boys falling over them.

Loud, crowded, busy, room to room, wall to wall - it's a big day, a big night, let's all get smashed. Let's wear what we feel sexiest in, get smashed, and let's get fucked. Kiss me, screw Me.

The narrator has been concentrating on her studies so hard she doesn't really know many boys. Just the ones in her class who study hard, too. Her friend hasn't even noticed any boys, unless they come with graphite pencils attached, quoting Shakespeare, and sketching in perspective. The boys she likes want to be Shelley or Hopkins or Escher, and are probably gay.

Yes, the event - the party. It's all right. It would be all right, but there _you_ are. _You_ can talk to anyone, but anyone can't talk to you. _You_ are candid and free and you hold up a mirror people can't bear; you're quicksilver, tangential. The narrator, the _I_ of the tale is bogged in a drift of familiar faces and predictable personalities, a tide flowing in an inexorable path towards indeterminance and conservatism. This is what her town produces. Her friend is the gift of a cuckoo that laid the egg of difference, and she herself is the would-be pearl diver, finding shimmering beauty in the grain of dissonance.

They hang about, the students, dithering, apart from the alcohol-emboldened who disappear to the shadows and start necking. In this environment, some girls will be on the injection so that they don't have periods to get in the way of their skiing holidays. Some boys will carry condoms because their mothers will have told them that girls who say they're on contraceptives aren't to be trusted. Those girls will get pregnant and give you herpes. Awful.

The narrator tells us she's been talking, dancing, whatever, and it's late. Her date is robber-mouthed and octopus-handed and bugging the shit out of her. Smuggled-in alcohol, and puffs on a joint have made her reality somewhat curved and smudged and trip-footed.

The school grounds are expansive and she wants to escape from Handsy the Groper, who keeps trying to touch her breasts. She might have enjoyed his attentions if he'd bothered talking to her first. Flee to the vegetable garden, where it's quiet and deserted. Quiet and deserted except for the orgasmic moans of couples who are getting it on.

Go back! Go back!

On her way to, really - who knows the fuck where? - she finds you.

"Where's your date?" she asks.

"I've left him back there somewhere. I'm not really liking him all that much. Where's _your_ date? Is he nice?"

"Oh, he went to the bathroom, and then to get us drinks. Yeah, he's nice."

Dark, quiet, warm, silken night. Oh, I'm a little dizzy, and you're beautiful. You've always been beautiful. I can't imagine kissing the loser-douche boy I came with, but on this scent-laden, moon-drenched night, I could kiss _you_.

Not knowing why, but risking - the narrator kisses her friend gently on the cheek.

No reaction, other than a little surprise, a little smile.

Risking more, kiss again, gentle, sweet, corner of the mouth.

I don't know what I'm doing - do you? This has come out of _nowhere_. Risking _all_, kisses her full, open, soft, wordless asking, is this how you do it? Is this okay? Can I?

Receiving mouth still, stiff, unmoving, for seconds that thump the full lifetime of an aching heart, until a response. Yes, hesitant, growing more sure, _yes_, kiss me, kiss me.

All of seconds, the curve of a wave, no hands, not at hips, or breasts. Mouths gentler than it's ever been with a boy, tongues inviting, not assaulting, and lips supple until they spring apart, because nether of them are lesbians, and what the crying fuck just happened? Did I imagine it, or was that just amazing?

I think it _was_. I think it shook me. I think I lost the ground and I've been falling in a quagmire and bouncing off a hard surface, and was that really the feel of the inside of your mouth? Please - was it? Don't run away from me.

And here, the writing stops following any linear progression, the story expounds with unrelated paragraphs, unfinished sentences, obscure metaphors. We, the readership, are caught in the undertow of confusion, disorientation, indecision. The descriptions of the girl are paeans, eulogies. There is a sudden explosion of knowing, after one fleeting kiss, that the narrator is in love - deeply, powerfully. The object of her affections, however, is not so sure, and retreats, unreturning.

The narrator dodges her date's arms and mouth, goes home, lies sleepless.

Following the party, and the impulsive kiss that was a revelation, the narrator is terrified about the next school day. It appears that her tremors and anticipation are mirrored once class starts again. She and her friend can't lock eyes, wary traversers of this new terrain. They sidestep, glance sidelong but can't face one another outright, can't declare anything. Bittersweet, agonizing joy when she looks up to find the other regarding her, but soon confusion at the blank expression, and following the confusion,anguish.

They don't talk about it for the first couple of weeks. They don't talk at all. The narrator finds herself avoided, evaded, foiled, slipped past and slithered by. You couldn't exactly sweep this under the carpet though - something so big? Hey - we _kissed_ - not as friends, as lovers. And it wasn't just me - you joined in! Can we do it again? Nothing more than kissing - no touching, eerrgghh! Those parts you have that are the same as what I have? Never! But I want to lick your tongue. God, I liked it so much. Didn't you? Please. _Please_.

And then, before they've talked, the friend is quieter still, locked, remote and impenetrable. The two of them hadn't gotten back to common ground though they were working up to it, instead of running a mile in the opposite direction at each glimpse of the other. But one day there's a perceptible cold, dense wall, a fortress, a forcefield, worse than anything. One day the narrator is totally shunned and blanked, and the best friend is no longer a figure of animation and expression; she's a still life, frozen stiff. Speechless mannequin zombie. There's no explanation, it's just that one day the world stops turning. And not long after that - her friend simply leaves, without notice. Doesn't complete school. Not many weeks to go, but she's out of there. Worse - she's out of town. Gone. Gone.

So school finishes, on a weird lurch. The next year and next week and tomorrow that were agreed on had disappeared like shifting sands. Unbalanced the narrator like a step ladder with rungs missing, like a rip, a fracture, a split in the ground beneath your feet that indicates seismic upheaval.

There's no resolution. No conclusion. No epilogue. No more pages. The entire last paragraph of the last chapter is the first paragraph of the first chapter reprinted.

We have arrived at the beginning, and that's the end of the book.

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Oh, dear readers, ffn still hates me. I hope you don't.


	20. Chapter 20

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

Stunned. Trying to make sense of it.

Private pertubations put aside, I can see why people have liked this book, why the hub-bub, why the talk-show tour. It's well-written, for a start, engaging and flowing. It takes us on leaps and dives, for another thing. You think it's something, then it becomes something else. Then it becomes something else again. Beginning as what seems a straightforward personal growth journey; the recount of someone who worries they're ordinary and wishes they could find the key to unlock the specialness inside, which is too indefined and undeveloped to find a way out. They live behind the facade of their everyday face, while true gifts bubble beneath the surface, clamoring, but needing the right environment in order to bloom. You think you've identified this person, you know her. You feel the stifling when she's stifled, you feel the slow, growing relief as she frees herself. You're surprised, and yet not really when you read that she thinks of someone from her past, and when she makes that phone call, you're sure she loves a boy from her school days, and they'll reconcile.

And then it turns back time and is about friendship, and growing up, and being a moth to a flame. Knowing someone who turns on the switch in you, being part of a bond that nurtures, giving your strengths because you can, liking and enjoying and needing the flare and flair you've found in another person. The reader is still waiting to hear about the boy. He must be the date at the school dance.

And the sudden, scandalous shock. We weren't expecting a lesbian kiss. We weren't expecting the fracturing, the breaking of someone we have seen as strong and resilient, though the book's opening warned us. We weren't expecting the book's close, which takes us to the beginning. The end of the first part is the true end, but it's not an end. It's a cliff-hanger, and we needed to know what happened next. She never told us, though I assumed that she would. She's left wanting, we're left wanting. Very clever.

I'm a fast reader. Usually I have to read things several times because I can't help skimming, and on further readings I get so much more. But I've gotten every word of this and I need to speak to Renee.

I know it's not fiction, because with no uncertainty whatsoever I recognize a character, and because truth and reality imbue every word. It's an autobiography, a memoir. Journal, diary. Pip is presumably the voice telling the story, and the friend is who I recognise.

Renee has never told me anything, anything about her childhood, her adolescence, her school days, but now a chronicler has given my mother's past to me. The friend is my mother, without a doubt. This book is a reaching out, a tale of admiration and upheaval, and settlement and knowledge, and it might possibly be an invitation. It might even just possibly be a love letter.

But my birthday is September, nine months after New Year's eve, the night of the party. Pippa kissed a girl that night, and liked it. What about the girl? What about Renee? _What happened?_

I pace for a while, feeling the enormity of what is about to happen. I never thought to question the status quo of our dyad when I was little, then when I understood most other children had fathers I asked if I had one. There was an answer - he's dead - but there wasn't any explanation, and I accepted that. I was young. Getting older, I didn't want to ask because it became embarrassing, and getting older still, I was too proud. Then it was sort of a mystery, and romantic. He's dead. How gothic.

And my butterfly mother - her singleness. Oh, I had constructed a hugely dramatic scenario in lieu of any information - she had loved him so much she'd never been able to fall in love with anyone else.

But my dreamed-up self-constructed story just took a blow that might well result in shards. I have no idea - _no idea_ - who my mother is, who I am, and what bearing Pip's story has on anything. A Journey Around My Heart? I'm embarked and adrift on a journey around my mother.

Renee is on the deck outside her room, and she's waiting for me. She's been waiting for years.

"Tell me," I say.

"Sit down."

And so, ladies and gentlemen, may I present the missing prologue in the life story of Isabella Swan?

Visibly gathering herself, Renee begins.

"Obviously, Pippa is telling the story. And obviously, I am the un-named friend. I am astonished that she did this, Bo-bo, knocked for six. But it's her story, not mine, though they're connected, inextricably. I owe you _mine_. Mine and yours. It's been a long time coming.

"Besides my mother, Pippa is the first other person I have any memories of. Those early years are all tangled up in my memory, but Pip was a presence that was always there. I felt like she was my older sister, even though we're the same age. When I couldn't do things, like - I don't know, whatever - she helped me. The teachers would say, "Sort the blocks into groups of color," and I did, putting all the colors in every group, but the teachers didn't like how I did it, and Pippa would know what they wanted, and she'd make everything right. When the other kids picked on me because of my hair or my clothes, Pippa would tell them off. I'd flunk tests, and she'd study and get good marks, and she'd always say something positive, like, "You're so clever these tests just can't pick it up," or "These results don't matter. You're good at other stuff."

"And we got older, and I realized I was quite different to the other kids, and I worried about it sometimes. I just couldn't concentrate the way I was expected to, and I didn't understand things that they found easy. On the other hand, everyone seemed so slow and plodding to me and I was constantly frustrated that nobody could keep up. Pip was always my friend, never letting me be a freak or criticizing me, assuring me I was okay. We were so close - _so close_ - and we talked about our lives and about how things would be, and we day-dreamed and, yeah, lived and got on with it and grew up. She was a hard worker, and I couldn't get my head around studying, but I had an affinity for arts subjects, and flew through those exams even though I never prepared for them. Pip did really well in subjects that had definite answers, like maths and science and history, because she was so good with facts.

"And then, the year my life changed. That party. Can I show you a picture?"

Rummaging in a drawer for a moment. A little rectangle in her hand. Worn, faded, smudged - god, how much has she touched this? And why have I never seen it?

It's her and a boy. Oh, Renee. You had to be eighteen, but you look much younger. So pretty, so open, in a dress that's dated now, and a hairstyle that's even worse. With a boy who's very tall, uncomfortable in a suit, but handsome and dark-eyed. Dark haired. Cheekbones and jawbones and narrow nose. Saints alive - he looks like me. I look like him. Stare and stare.

"Oh, he was gorgeous, Bo-bo. Gorgeous-looking and gorgeous in nature. I couldn't believe it when the whole chinese whispers thing said he'd go out with me. Charlie Swan. I knew who he was, and I'd seen him before, and I'd even hung around sometimes places where he was, hoping to talk to him. It was a small town where we lived - even though he was a couple of years older, we knew each other by sight. Pippa and I were really buzzed to be going to the party, and she had a date, too, I can't remember now who it was. Doesn't matter really. I went with Charlie to the party, and he was a calm, even personality. It was a little hard to draw a conversation out of him, but when he did speak he was funny and smart. Really polite, sincere and charming, and he paid me compliments and blushed when he said them. He was just all kinds of lovely. God. He'd done well academically and people were surprised after school he'd gone into the police academy, but he was doing a degree there - and he really believed in law and justice and community."

Her eyes lost with remembering...

"At the party he and I chatted a bit and danced a bit and I'd built up a whole scenario in my mind, about how we were going to find we really liked each other, and then we'd date and he'd be my boyfriend. That felt to me it was how things were progressing. And then - he'd gone to get us some lemonade, and Pippa appeared. I'd hardly seen her all night - I'd been so occupied with Charlie. But Pippa was just standing there, and she and I had gotten ready together, planned our dresses, done each other's hair - the full girly thing. She's kind of - well, you know, you've met her. She's not pretty, but she has a presence. She's noticeable. She came up to me, and she was this person that I'd known all my life, this person who'd given me confidence when I hadn't had any, and who'd always encouraged me. My closest, dearest, best friend. And right out of the blue she kissed me.

"Bo-bo, I nearly collapsed. God knows, I'd never had any certainties about anything much, but I was certain that I was straight, and that Pippa was straight, too! We talked about boys to each other all the time! But she was so soft, and so unexpected, and startling, and it felt good. It felt _good_. Her kissing me challenged whatever I thought I knew about myself. Challenged what I thought I knew about the world. It didn't last long, but I let it happen, and I _liked_ it. I kissed her back, but I had to run away, because I couldn't process it. And I ran back to Charlie."

Renee falters.

"I went to Charlie, Bo-bo, and I couldn't dance any more, or talk, or even think, I was so overwhelmed with what had happened between me and Pip. I couldn't stand to consider what it might mean. I mean, I knew about lesbians, and I thought they were women who were mannish and militant - nothing like Pippa, and nothing like me. I was very naive, Bo-bo. Being kissed by a girl was sudden and shocking, and I'd had the evening all mapped out. I had a crush on Charlie! When he turned up with the drinks I told him I wanted to leave, because I couldn't face the possibility of running into Pip again that night. He was so lovely, not knowing a thing about it, all shy and happy. He thought I wanted to be alone with him. He got my coat for me and we got out of there."

She stops now, no longer with me. Or maybe she is, ghosting.

"_Bo_."

Oh, she's gone. Can't even see.

"I got him to pull over on the way home, somewhere dark. I kissed him. He was surprised - not expecting it. Pleased, though. Enthusiastic. He was even more surprised when I pulled my panties off and climbed on top of him."

_What_? Oh, Renee, no.

She's toneless.

"I seduced him, in cold blood. I'd never been with anybody before. It was painful and messy and he tried to slow me down and to be sweet about it, but I didn't care. I wanted to have sex with a man, with a _penis_, to prove to myself that kissing Pippa hadn't been anything. If she hadn't done that to me and completely messed with my head, I might have made out a little with Charlie on the way home, like a normal girl on a normal date. So that's what I was doing, although I had to take it further, all the way. I wouldn't let him stop me, although he tried to. Oh, Bo-bo. We didn't have a condom, and when he was finishing he yanked me off him, and he nearly put my head through the roof. The whole thing was a debacle, a disgrace, because my motivation for seducing him was so wrong. Well, Charlie seemed awestruck by it - afterwards he held me and whispered beautiful things and said he'd buy me another dress, since we'd ruined the one I was wearing. He drove me home and wanted to linger and talk and kiss but I was coming back to earth by then, realizing what a stupid and irresponsible thing I'd done. I wanted to crawl into a hole."

Nothing I can say. Speechless and appalled. My conception - a fleeting encounter in a car between a girl who was trying to get somebody out of her head and a boy who thought she liked him?

"And then he came around the next day and Bo, I couldn't face him. I just couldn't. I was so ashamed of my behavior, using him like that, so that I could avoid dealing with my confusion over Pip. He'd brought flowers and chocolate, and I told my mother to say I wasn't home. She asked if he'd behaved inappropriately on our date, and when I said he hadn't she refused to lie for me and said I had to speak to him. When I wasn't at all welcoming or friendly to him he got upset and tried to apologize for the sex being hurried and unromantic - as if it was _his_ fault! Stammering about not having a condom, because he hadn't planned any of it. He was so bewildered, thinking that I must have been crazy about him to jump on him like that. In spite of me being horrible to him, he was asking me out, and still saying lovely things. The excuses I made didn't deter him, and he kept suggesting days and times that he and I could see each other, though I was refusing them all. I felt worse and worse. The biggest bitch this universe ever spawned. When he left he said he'd call, and he did. Every day.

"And Pippa. She was so scared to see me at school, and so worried about what she'd done, but I couldn't face her either, because of what_ I'd_ done, because I'd run away from her like a coward, and then taken advantage of a boy who was kind and decent. I couldn't speak to her. She was hurt, but of course, she was misinterpreting it all because she didn't know the real reason I was keeping away from her. She didn't know my _shame_.

"And Bo - even thought the whole episode had been so shitty, I really thought that after a few weeks things would be all right. I'd talk to Pip and she'd admit she'd had a crazy impulse that hadn't meant anything, I'd say it was okay, and it hadn't meant anything to me either, and I'd date Charlie. It was going to work out, and no-one was going to suffer. But Bo, oooohhh..."

My mother has gazed into the air between us as she relates this tale of double perfidy. She regards me steadily now. It's time.

"Within a couple of weeks I found I was pregnant. I hadn't the faintest idea how to tell either of them. I was throwing up left, right and center and my mom figured it out immediately. She said we had to leave. She said if I stayed around I'd set a bad example for the girls at my school, so I had to drop out, and finish my education once you were born. She said you were my priority now, and I owed it to you to be healthy and take care of myself during my pregnancy, not be studying for exams and getting stressed and not eating or sleeping properly. She quit her job, she wrote a letter to the school to say that we were moving away, and we just went, before I was even showing, before anybody could know. Well, initially I was too ashamed to tell Pippa, and I thought I should tell Charlie in person. I was waiting for the opportunity to see him face-to-face, because it's not a bomb you can drop over the phone. But we moved so quickly. I didn't get the chance to tell either of them."

Another silence.

"I didn't tell Charlie," whispered again.

Charlie didn't know? My father didn't know about me?

"We'd spoken more between the party and my sudden departure. He hadn't given up Bo-bo; for those few weeks he called and came around, and he made no secret of the fact that he was pursuing me. Steadfast and persistent. Eventually we went to the pictures and he didn't try for sex again, or even kisses, he let me know it was all up to me, but that he liked me. Pippa was trying to talk to me too, but she was edgy and looked scared to death whenever she saw me. Then everything happened so fast. My period was late, I started fainting, I was so tired I fell asleep several times a day, and Mom took me to a doctor out of town, to avoid gossip. I didn't go back to school after the day my pregnancy was confirmed. Charlie was in police academy anyway, so he wasn't really aware of my mystery ailment. He'd told me he was going on a residential training school and he'd be away for two weeks. He said he'd be out of cell range and wouldn't be able to call me, but that he'd let me know as soon as he was back. Pip and I were only just speaking, it was all very strained, and I said I was off school because I wasn't well. And then Mom and I left - no goodbyes. It was by chance that I was reading a newspaper a few days later and saw an article about a tragic accident at a police cadet camp. There was a shooting exercise and the guns were supposed to loaded with blanks, but one of them wasn't..."

She slowly floods, thinking of the boy she wanted to love. I flood too. The father _I_ wanted to love. That handsome, dark-eyed young man in the photo - shot? _Shot_? Bullets, ripping him? Flesh from flesh, heart blue and stopped, lying like Hal lay, all vibrancy and valor in a flash, lost.

Charlie, I never knew, and you never knew.

Renee, I can't bear this.

"I gave you his name, because it was all I could give _him_. All he could have of you, and of me. My virginity, a whole load of confusion... stolen, misirected kisses and outright indecision... And then afterwards I changed_ my_ name too, to try and give him respect and acknowledgement, and to somehow try to give you your parents' togetherness, because I hadn't been able to give it to him. Bo, I was so young. _So young_. Jesus, I'd undo the hurt if I could. And I thought I couldn't give you anything of him beyond his name - and yet look at you! You're your father's daughter. Him all over. Quiet and clever and deep and lovely. I've been so afraid of you."

How? I don't say it aloud but she hears me.

"Afraid I'll let you down. Afraid I can't give you enough. Afraid to love you, afraid to lose you. In a single night I screwed up two people I cared about, and brought another into being."

She'd said the other day that she got me after one kiss, and I'd figured she meant something wildly romantic about kissing my father for the first time and falling in love, and that led on to the grand passion that produced me. But no - the one kiss that tipped the first domino was the liplock with Pippa. "A kiss can change your life," Renee had said. Oh. Renee, Pippa, Charlie.

All of this is too awful and too dreadful. Every day of my life she has lived with the sorrow and consequence of an impulse that took seconds to think of and minutes to enact. And I'm nothing like her - I'm like him. Every day of my life she has been faced with the image of the man she did wrong by. Is that why she couldn't love me? Couldn't get close to me? Couldn't make me feel connected to her?

"I'm your mistake," I say slowly. "I'm the price you pay, because you didn't know how to react when Pip kissed you. Does she know?"

Fast, Renee is next to me, arm tight, tight at my shoulder. Emphatic.

"You're _not_ a mistake. You're the best thing I ever did. You're wonderful, and I'm sorry you and Charlie never had each other, but you're part of me and part of him, and yet yourself. I can never quite believe that out of such - such a stupid _mess_ of me - came such a wondrous and beautiful miracle as you. I'm sorry a thousand, a _million_ times over that I hurt people, but you're the phoenix, risen out of one night's chaos. Without you, Charlie would be gone altogether, but aspects of him live on in you. Without you, I don't know what would have happened to me, but it doesn't matter. You taught me so much, Bo. Things like how to keep it together day by day, paying bills, that sort of thing. But you taught me more besides. Less prosaic stuff. You gave me _meaning_."

I'm not even on solid ground here. Barely breathing. Renee thanking a baby because looking after a baby meant she had to have it together to pay the electricity bill. Random and surreal. Over the years she has been remote, cheerful, singing, flitting through the minutes and the hours and the days. Forgetting to turn up to school for meet-the-teacher night, sending me to someone's birthday party on the wrong day because she lost the invitation. Gradually I stepped up to the plate, taking on responsibility as and when I was able.

So here we are. The odd couple, bound in a symbiosis that has slowly evolved to work well enough. Her relationship with my father unrecallably unresolved, but I'm him all over, and the universe threw me at her so she'd have a chance to make amends. I am both my mother's nemesis, and her redemption.

However, she and I are not the only two players here.

"Pippa?" I ask.

"God, I don't know. I don't know."

Pippa.

.

.

.

Oh, please, please _please_ ffn, let me load this! Please don't wipe it when I hit "add chapter"!


	21. Chapter 21

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

It's late morning, although this surely isn't the same day it was when I woke up.

There's so much more to say, there's more to ask. I don't know what I can even cope with, but real and imminent and close any day now, is Pip, for my mother and I to face.

_One kiss can change your life_.

Infrequent dating, meetings with strangers set up by well-meaning friends, hello-goodnight-thank-you-for-a-pleasant-evening, both of you. All of these events going nowhere, both of you. Pip's experiences documented in print, Renee's residing in a soft little memory compartment in my head. Mother, you lost Charlie. Is there someone else you haven't honestly acknowledged? To yourself? Someone who stopped you from finding anyone? Stopped you even from finding _her?_ Maybe you've been living a long, long while blind. Because if you knew there might be someone you wanted, surely you would have pursued.

Lips won't even scaffold the words, I don't know how to approach this, though inside I'm eloquent. Internally I could frame it. All these years, your aloneness, your sporadic encounters. You didn't bring anyone home. Were they women, were they men, these people you were going out with? Not that it matters which, because it's okay. Just - what now? Pippa will walk through the door soon, soon, and surely you have to address this, Renee. She may have been in your past, and the two of you may have parted and left one another behind years ago, but you're about to be each other's present. You'll be under the same roof. She wrote a book about you! You can pretend to discount the before, you can make passing reference to it and smile fondly - I don't know. How important was it that you two kissed? How significant? Was it life-changing, Renee?

I already know it was. It engendered me. But mother, mother - what about you? Was it anything? Was it something? Because now we know it was something to Pip. It was everything to Pip.

And mother, don't tell me you haven't thought about this. Just don't. Although, knowing you - maybe you have, and you've moved to the next thing. Not because you don't care, not because it was too hard. Because you're intangible, unholdable, a dandelion clock. It's not your choice, it's your nature. You love, and love deeply, but you've no internal anchor. I hold you by a slender thread, and I'm all that keeps you anywhere near the ground. I've had you for years, and gotten to you know over the last few weeks, and I've gotten to know you over the last hour or so. It's new, this you. So new.

"Bella-Bo, it wasn't easy. Mom took me away, I gave birth to you; I looked after you and Mom worked, and then I worked while Mom looked after you. I studied - and there was no time. No time at all - every second was taken up with the demands of getting through every day and every next day. I pushed everything but the immediate to the back of my mind. Knowing Charlie was gone killed a part of me that's gone for good. In a way, it gave me a stoicism - but God it made me so mistrustful and wary. I did meet guys I liked, but I was terrified they'd be struck by lightning - the curse of me. If I had sex with someone they'd die. It took me years, and a lot of therapy before I could let anyone touch me again.

"And whoever I met - all the time, every time, my primary concern was my little girl. Who is this person asking me out? Are they interesting and amusing and attractive? That's what other people think about, but those weren't my concerns. My concerns were: does this person like kids? Specifically, my kid? Will my kid like them? And: if I'm going to go out with you, you have to understand - I don't get drunk, or take drugs, or stay out all night, or do anything that can compromise my ability to be physically present for my child.

"You've asked me about my dating. We were all young then, everyone I knew, and I was the only one with a baby. Any potential partners I met simply weren't mature enough. So, there were parties now and again, or dances, and there were people I had fun with, and who were nice, but never anyone I could be serious about."

"Were you dating women?"

"Occasionally. I was trying to figure it all out. And now I feel like I'm a hundred years old, and like I'm still a teenager at the same time. I don't believe there's just one love for any of us - I believe if you're open and receptive, and you're a loving person you'll find different levels of compatibility with different people, and you'll have options. Having said that, I think if Charlie had lived, he and I would be together and happy now."

Pause, long exhalation.

"Even when I dated women - and yes, Bo, I slept with some of them - I didn't think of myself as gay. I thought it was all about the personality and the mind, regardless of what body shape it turned up in. With Pippa, I thought I knew her inside out, and I never questioned or examined the way I felt about her. Being around her was just as natural as breathing. It simply didn't enter my head to consider whether I found myself attracted to her until well after she'd kissed me. When she kissed me it felt like an earthquake, and I had to get out of there. Then there was Charlie, and I knew I liked him. Then there was - well - then there was you. It was a long, long time before I let myself myself think about much more than diapers and bottle feeds.

"And, Bo - my world was turned on its end, anyway. I'd moved away from everyone and everything I ever knew - and Charlie wasn't around, and Pippa wasn't around. There was me trying to raise you while I was still growing up myself, and my mother trying to help me. You were an easy baby - I'll say that - you didn't demand much. You used to just look and look, all wanting to know about the world, curious and calm, open and ready for the knowledge to just flow into you. I read aloud to you, book after book after book, and you soaked up every word, and you'd repeat things back to me - whole phrases! So bright. And like your Dad, you didn't say much - but when you did, you went straight to the heart of everything. You and I were so different sometimes I didn't know what to do with you. But you were a gift to me, darling. I tried to show you everything - music, art, theatre, science, sport. Wherever your interests lay, I wanted you to find them. I hope you think you have choices open to you, baby."

I picture it, Renee, excitable, childlike, skipping on pavements and flying over the cracks, hand-holding with a skinny little child. "Look at the flowers, look at the birds!" she'd sing, but the child, me, was looking at the cracks. What an incongruous pairing. Or were we? Had I been born so that Renee would grow up? Renee is surely an adult now. But am I? Or are we growing up together?

That's something to ponder, and probably unanswerable. My mother in silver hair and lined skin will still be thrilled by every new day, I'm sure of it. She'll still dance to the beat of her senses, facing thrilled by the breeze, kinesthetic everlong and smiling at inner thoughts and outer wonders.

So what are her inner thoughts about what's just about to erupt? Let's work up to it.

"How was it when Pippa called you after all that time?"

Another moment, long and without breath. I don't know if she's formulating an answer, or thinking about conserves.

Then, "Could we have some lunch, Bo? Melon marbles with blue cheese and chilled chili prawns? We can talk some more later."

Not conserves, but she's lost the thread. Renee is exhausted. So am I.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Late afternoon, a knock on the glass door between the inside and the outside of the shoreside palace, and I jump.

Brown, sun-tossed in the sand and sea, scruffy and hairy-legged, mouth smiling but eyes not. They're intent, just for me, touching and want and sex and mouth and sex. A current flows between us, despite Suzy at his heel interrupting it, floating, whirling flash that she is.

"Come to the cafe?" he asks, voice musical and fluid and not something you could say no to.

Unless you - well, unless you just found your existence was predicated on a whim, or you just found out your father and your mother fucked in a flash, once ever, and then your father died by misadventure without knowing you were a speck on his horizon, or you just found out that your holiday house was given to you for free because its owner has harbored a lifelong crush on your mother...

Still, I feel the pull.

"I think that's an excellent idea," Renee says heartily.

The intensity of my day has left me somewhat over-sensitized, I know it. But I'll compartmentalize it all and store it somehow, because the necessity of him can't be over-ridden by what's happened. If he was an everyday ongoing mainstay perhaps I could put him on hold while I puzzle myself out, but he isn't. He and I have so little time I can't turn down an invitation. I can't decline a second. Renee and I can deplore ourselves for years, but Brown isn't tied to me inextricably by law and convention the way my mother is.

Yes, the cafe. Beach-walk, trudge the sand that Suzy skips over. You, Brown, yes.

_Suzy pushes past her keeper and looks for Hal, nose in his basket rumpling the blanket as though she'll find him hiding somewhere in it. I gather sandals, and pass Renee on my way out. There is sorry and I love you in her eyes, and in mine too, mirrored right back. The truth she's imparted is not anything I could ever have imagined. I've already forgiven her, though she's paid for what happened - paid daily, yearly, and now she's paying again, wondering if I'm okay. _

_I can hardly bear to leave her, but Brown and I walk down to the sand, his arm immediately around me, fingers to my waist. Lips to my neck. Teeth to my neck. Oh, the Brown I surrender to, wanting to play and play. With me. His correct assumption of permission to touch._

_He's effusive, telling me about his morning. Every little thing. He makes brushing his teeth anecdotally rich. Before we slept together I thought he was quiet - and now he wants to share all his moments. Mine, over the last few hours, are too private to share. I need to digest them into a form that can occupy space in my own head, never mind in somebody else's._

_But he knows I'm a quiet type so he's undeterred, and the kissing and nuzzling and nibbling and story-telling continues with Suzy prancing about yelling her head off at seabirds. Introspect that I am - I don't utter a word._

_In the cafe Tori, who was probably nicely conceived, not on the side of a road - bends towards him. Ostensibly to wipe our table, affording him a clear view down her front. She's not stacked, not by any means, but she's a girl, and those are tits in there. Brown averts his face and says, "Takeout?" to me._

_Under a tree, one puppy panting and lolling, two humans sitting facing out to sea, Brown finally responds to my half-hour of silence._

_"Bella?"_

_It's not directed at him, just beamed outwards._

_"Hey, you've hardly said anything. In fact - oh, you're not really talking. Is anything the matter?" and, __"What's wrong? What is it?"_

_I turn into him, seeking a dimness that will hide me, seeking his shoulder, which saved me from monsters when we were watching "The Thing", and saved me from vertigo and fear of falling on the ferris wheel. That shoulder, and the top of his chest and the curve of the arm that holds me could save me from all ills except the one weighing on me today._

_I'm given time to wallow briefly in the warm place of him, but briefly is all. He pulls back and raises my chin with a finger._

_"You're being very remote." _

_"Aren't you speaking to me?"_

_"You're leaving - when? A couple of days? Is this how you've decided to do it - this awful aloofness? Shut me down? Freeze me out? Are you ending things?" I register pain on his face._

_Oh no - I don't mean to give him that impression._

_"We haven't talked about this, about you going - I've avoided it, and so have you." A very deep sigh, from him. "Can we please talk about it now? Will you please just say something?"_

_"Sorry I'm like this. I don't intend to be. It's not you," I mumble, and the look he responds with is open-mouthed shock._

_"You're not actually giving me the "_It's not you, it's me" _speech are you?"_

_No. "No."_

_"You can't, you _can't!_" Setting his jaw, eyes sparkling into the far away over the blue, he's very tense, and it's awful. This beautiful, beautiful boy has me at breaking point. The knowledge of my upcoming departure from him makes me ache. For a few hours back there, I forgot our impending separation, because of what my mind was suddenly filled with. Oh, I want to tell him what's going on, but although the past concerns me, it's someone else's story, and I can't violate their privacy. Constraint makes me into a mute. He takes my shoulders, and the tears tremble on his eyelids._

_"_Please_. Be honest with me."_

_Well, sure. How do I phrase this? I'm weirded out is all, because I discovered this morning that my mother hasn't a clue as to her sexual orientation and my father is a guy she fucked for five minutes in a car one night when she was trying to figure out if she was a girl's-girl or a guy's girl, and he died shortly afterwards. To add to the absurdity and tragedy, the only other person who ever evoked her carnal desires and who is probably the one true love she never realized she cared for is turning up in two days time - and I'm smack-bang in the middle of this whole shitstorm, oh, and I think I love you, but Jeez, I'm leaving town. That's what's got me pre-occupied._

_Brown's hands are at the sides of my face and I will fall._

"Bella." Quietly, deeply, heartfelt. "I know that, well, physically speaking, this thing with the two of us has only been a matter of days. But all in all it's been going longer than that. Hasn't it? And it's not a holiday romance. We need to talk. You need to tell me what you think. Don't leave me in this limbo."

Where are we? Who are we? I need to find a foundation again, to lock my self in now and here. We're on the grass. The sea beyond us, the street behind, the cafe to one side, the whole of this summer town and summer mood all about. It's not the real world. It's not mornings when you don't want to get up but the alarm clock nags you, and the bus will leave you behind if you're not at the stop, and you have to wear stockings and stupid horrible business clothes and work nose to the grindstone in an office or you'll be in penury. The real world is not this place where a beautiful boy sighs at you from beneath curved eyelashes and he has the most perfect mouth you've ever seen and his words touch you like velvet caresses while his body is both a pleasure machine and a playground and the scents and noises that come from him turn you into an animal.

"Edward." I have two more days. Two more days to have you. But Renee has knocked the stuffing out of me so that I don't even know if I have two minutes. Me? There _was_ a me, I think, dimly.

And Brown, poor Brown, doesn't know without me telling him, and he assumes the very worst.

"Okay. Okay. Well, not okay. I've been thinking - hoping - that you and I really meant something, and we'd work out a way to see one another, and shit, Bella, I don't care how long it takes. You're studying - three years for your undergraduate degree? We can do it. Holidays, weekends... And then we decide where we'll be. Is this all too much for you? Are we on the same track?" Slow hurt in his voice. "What is _this_, and what are we going to do?"

Oh, it's so real. So real. What he's saying - every word. The look on him, his eyes, his face, he's waiting to take flight or to plummet. So am I, almost, if there's a way through the pure sludge that makes me feel so ill-conceived. Wrapped in self-absorption, self, self, I have to look outside, because just beyond the limits of my vapor-thin cowl of skin, Brown sits, anxious. He thinks it's about him, that this is rejection, and in doing so he is unguardedly showing me a fragility I hadn't suspected. He is showing me what I want - that _he_ wants. Both of us want _us_. If I hurt him it could be irreparable.

"Edward, I'm kind of a mess right now. The timing is bad, really bad."

Tells him nothing, and he swallows and bites his lip, then puts his hands over his eyes.

"Just tell me straight out, please. Whatever you're going to say."

"Okay."

He waits.

"I've never said anything to you about my dad. That's actually because I didn't really know anything. Renee told me some stuff this morning, and it's wiped me out. That's it."

Instantly, his hand to my cheek.

"Truly? That's what you mean about the timing? You're so withdrawn like this because of hearing about your father?" Brown.

"_God_." Brown.

"I'm so fucking selfish. Jesus. I thought - never mind what I thought. Do you want to talk about him?" Brown. Relieved and concerned.

"No. Sorry. No. I can't. It's too raw."

"Oh, fuck." Reaches for me, pulls me in, holds me lightly. "_I'm_ sorry. Putting pressure on you. You've never mentioned your father, and I didn't want to ask, because I thought if things were cool you would have spoken about him."

"He's dead."

Sharp intake of breath, Brown's hands move to my hair. "Bella, Bella." His lips are there too, he's kissing me. "_Jesus_. Did you just find out?"

"I kind of knew, but I hoped it wasn't true."

Not telling him any of the rest of it, I need time to get used to it all. Anyway, the tale is still unfolding.

"Sorry, sorry I hassled you. I just - when you didn't say anything I was so scared - I was worrying that this thing with me and you - well, oh, I'll shut up, I'm being stupid."

I haven't said anything to reassure him. I haven't declared myself. He's still anxious and he's trying to make out like he isn't. I want to kiss him. They're numbered now, our kisses. Reach up, hand to the back of his head.

"Mmm?" he says, not expecting this. His mouth, open for me immediately, tasting of coffee. I press, holding him and he makes a quiet sound, my body twisting towards him and then he makes a louder sound, still muffled because my mouth is over his.

He pulls back. "Is there anything you want to tell me?" he says, hope a quiet gleam.

"I - "

He won't let me kiss him again. But this shouldn't be hard to say. Even with whatever the hell else crapstorm flung itself around me today. What I need to tell Brown snuck up weeks ago and has become stronger and more of an imperative. How do I phrase it?

"Edward. I don't know how to do this. I want to work out a way I can still see you, after Renee and I leave. If that's what you want. It's what I want."

Oh! Now I'm allowed his mouth again, in fact I couldn't dodge it if I tried. There's an instant of a smile before his tongue hits mine. Suzy barks at us and we're both grinning in the kiss, trying to ignore her, trying to forget that our hands have to stay above board and decent, and I can't just open my legs, and he can't just roll between them.

When he finally peels away, that grin is plastered in place.

"Yes, definitely. Definitely. Oh, God, fuck, yes," then, "I did know that you weren't just pretending to like me. I could tell."

Cocky now, the opposite of how insecure he was a minute ago. Then he was heartbreaking, now he's irresistible. Breath on my neck, fingers stealing up my throat, his thumb rubs my ear lobe before he nips it in his teeth.

"How could you tell?" I murmur, faint as he tugs gently. He doesn't answer until he's had enough and I've gone limp against him.

"Your nipples. They like me a_ lot_."

I have to laugh at him. Or rip his shirt off. "Yes, they do," I nod. They're pointing right at him.

Silence, but for snuffling noises and kissing sounds, until Suzy sticks her nose on my bare waist, where Brown's devious hand has pulled my shirt free of my jeans. I yelp, and we resurface, blinking, laughing. Brown takes the fluffy puppy's blazed face and regards her seriously.

"Bella?" he asks her. "Could you maybe - have you thought about - would you consider - _not_ going? As in - _staying_?"

.

.

.

Well, that only took forever. Sorry for the delay.


	22. Chapter 22

Disclaimer

**Six Weeks**

Staying? Have I thought about it? Oh, Brown, if I told you how much I've thought about it I'd make myself sound certifiable. You'd run for the hills.

It didn't cross my mind before you touched me way back forever ago, at the party. That night I just thought you were a horny guy. After I'd gotten home I thought you were a horny guy who'd made the most inspired move ever, because that thing with my leg both terrified and heated me, and the terror was because of the heat. The heat was intensified by the terror. Your vocabulary was an intellectual aphrodisiac, and your very real consternation on the way home got me in the chest, once I understood what it had been about. You've been getting me in the chest ever since. So bad it's good, so good it's bad.

God, Brown, yes, I've constructed a fantasy future for you and me. Turning my back on the raindrops of where Mom and I live, and all they evoke. Foregoing the shifting silvered skies of the timber town, the seven hills. I'd ask Makendra if I could live with her, lodge in her space, and I'd invite you to my bed and I'd kiss you awake and fuck you to sleep, hear your music and your mind. Talk with Bear and walk with Blond, compound mediterranean relish to give to Mr Ninety. Play with Suzy, do the market with Alisha. Learn something - _anything_ - about cars, to relate to Gypsy. Tell her I was made in one - she might like that. And I'd be here, with _you_.

Unsayable this, so I kiss him again, the way we kiss when we're in each other. I feel his breath huffing through his nose and onto my cheek, his ribs starting to heave. We're somewhere people can walk past, but his tongue's in me now just like how he puts his dick in me - seeking and devastating. Hands at my cheeks, fingertips to my hair. Breaking away, eyes with that blurred, occupied, possessed look he gets. Takes him a second or two to come back.

"Uh," he says.

"Does this mean - ?" Him.

"Bella. You haven't answered. About the staying? You have to tell me outright if it's yes or no, since I'm kind of slow."

Oh, he's hopeful, he's wanting. He must already know the answer because I would have already said so, but he has to hear it. Words. I love that he loves them. Needs them. I love that he can coax them out of me, when I'd sit in a fugue otherwise. These ones that I have to tell him, though, these knife-bladed ones will hurt my throat on the way out and hurt his ears on the way in.

Because in this puppet-show I am not threadless. Titanium strands attach me to my mother - even more so now that she's told me of my engenderment. Renee won't commit herself to being here, I'm certain. She won't linger in the house with Pippa, even if the two of them are struck by what may seem undying love as soon as they lay eyes on one another, and she won't stay in this summer land either. She will want to be sure, sure, _sure_. She needs to go home and pore over this, unlike past decisions which have been made so hastily.

So why should I even consider my hitherto inconstant, unpredictable mother, when I know what _I_ want? Because. Because. I always knew she had nothing but me, and now I know she has _nothing_ but me. There is the inkling of a potential for some_thing_, some_one_ else for her, but she needs a rock to stand on in order to even reach for it, and I am her rock. It may not seem reasonable that I should support her, her being chronologically the adult - but she lost what I never had - the love and the foundation and the anchor that my father would have been. I have been and will be those things. I _want_ to be. She gave me her youth and her possibilities and she protected me from her sorrow until now that she has given it to me, yet bearing it, I will be what she needs.

Brown - it can't be the end for you and me - and if mere miles and mere months apart mean it's over then it wasn't what either of us thought it was. Which is wrenching, but if this is what I want to believe it is - we'll survive.

I don't have the nerve to say all this to him. To his glittering eyes. It's too many sentences, and I don't speak that much in one go.

Summarize. "I've thought about staying, yes, but I can't."

Held in his gaze. "Why not?"

"It's complicated."

Not good enough. Not _nearly_ good enough. Can't dismiss him, us, with so trite a non-explanation.

"Mom and I need to go back. There are things - things going on in our lives that need some time and consideration and we can't just drop it all and relocate."

The shutters come down fast. So fucking fast.

"I guess so. You've got a home back there, and a job, and friends and everything," he says stiffly. "There's none of that here. And you're starting Uni. "

He's trying not to sound crushed, I can hear it. It crushes me. It _crushes_ me to realize that he's affected enough to try to sound like he isn't.

"Well, you know, let's stay in touch, as I said. E-mails. Let me know how you're doing. I'll send you photos of Spanky in the dog race next year."

"Which Spanky? I could leave the toy one with you."

"It would probably run faster than the real one."

Neither of us can grin.

And I can't keep this up. Can't. _Can't_. He has to know. I have to find the place in myself that can articulate, and I have to pull the reasons and the meanings and the truth up, and tell him as much as I can.

"Edward, um, Renee needs to go back. She and I need to go back. Something's come up for her, and I've never had the opportunity to really support her before, because the two of us have just kind of drifted, but if we're back where we were, we've got stability while she figures stuff out. She's got work there, a routine, a steady income, our apartment... All of that is really important to her right now."

Not even looking at me, disappointed and resigned.

"Yeah. Well, okay, Bella. If that's what has to happen. It's your call. I think I'll head home with Suzy. You want to walk back?"

He stands, brushes sand off his backside, takes our empty cardboard cups to a trashcan and returns. Holds out his hand for me, to help me up. I need more help than that.

"Vacations?" I say, desperately. "Can I come back and visit?"

He's winding Suzy's leash around his wrist. "Do you actually want to?"

"Yes. Yes, I do. What do _you_ want?"

He runs - he just takes off and runs, Suzy yapping and bounding ahead. Disappeared around the corner, them both, leaving me flabbergasted. I could double over. We talked, we kissed, we talked - I know I'm all over the place emotionally and he must be having trouble interpreting - but I've said I want to keep seeing him! I've said I don't want it to be over.

Yet he's run out on me.

This afternoon, my mother said: "When Pippa called, I recognized her voice straightaway. It was like a timewarp. All she had to do was say my name, and I knew her. And then it was very general - this and that. It had been such a long time, there was plenty we had to tell each other. She knew I'd had a baby all those years ago - the grapevine was pretty efficient - and she was interested in how you were and what you were doing. She lamented how difficult things must have been for me, on my own, and she never asked who the father was. We just sort of skimmed it. In spite of that we fell into the old, best-friends easiness, as though we'd remained in touch all that time instead of not having spoken for years. And after that we talked every couple of weeks, and then she asked if you and I would like to look after her house and Hal. I couldn't pass it up, Bo. You and I needed time together, and time away from our lives, and it sounded perfect."

Two issues here, Mother.

One: don't even get me started. Pippa doesn't know the other half of my parentage? Or the circumstances? _For crying out fucking loud, Renee!_ Oh what a tangled web we weave, etc. You have borne this whole fucking thing, this whole secret solely on your shoulders for my whole life! Oh, Jesus, I don't know how you didn't just crumple from the weight of it all. My head hurts, my heart hurts, my everything hurts. I can't condemn you, I can't condone you.

Two: what does "perfect" mean? _Fuck!_ We've made friends in a community we have to leave; Pippa's beloved and valiant dog has died; I've fallen inescapably in love; and you and I have been shown a possibility far from our own - a place where we can _be_, and create, and grow and make things, and belong. We can stretch our wings and fly in the sun and the sunset, the sea and the seabreeze here, but our _real_ lives are elsewhere. Solid, tax-paying, money-earning, _worthy_ lives that enleaden us. What's your definition of "perfect", Renee? - because being here is a mindfuck.

But hey, I know my mother marginally more now - the woman she thinks she should be - and _this_ Renee won't uproot us on a whim. It's taken her years and years to barely manage economic administration and practical planning, and she'll be wary of relinquishing what she's built for us for the uncertainty of someone who might love her. Or who might just have drawn inspiration from an intense childhood friendship to create a story.

"And we've been getting on great, over skype, me and Pip. Just great. It's like we were never apart, but at the same time it's like we have so much to tell each other, and so many different experiences. Every conversation is at least an hour, Bo. At _least_."

Just because you two can talk for hours doesn't mean you'll get together. Have either of you brought up that you kissed five hundred years ago?

"We haven't gotten around to mentioning what happened that night. To tell you the truth, from the way Pippa's talked to me, I thought it just wasn't going to be anything. Swept under the carpet, you know? But then, there it is, all laid out in her memoir, like it's the biggest thing ever."

"Have you told her you've read it?"

"Fuck! No."

Renee so rarely curses that I see it might be time for another perusal of the liquor cabinet, even though it's only mid-afternoon. What would you like? Anything, so long as it's forty percent alcohol? It might be time to break out the chocolate, or make mango lassi with mint and chili, or beat your head against the tabletop, or hurl cutlery at the daylight moon. We do none of that. I keep talking.

"Well, how about when we arrived here - when you saw her?"

"Jesus - you were here too! It was all: oh, Renee, you might have to climb up a ladder and clean the guttering; remember to keep the glass doors closed, the salt gets in; there's a high-frequency insect zapper in the laundry, you can plug it in overnight. Take Hal to dance classes and varnish his toenails. Not exactly Hear My Gay Love Call."

Ingenuous. Shake my head. Renee.

"Actually - I was kind of wondering about you and Jim Bannerman - Mr Ninety's son?" I offer, just to see. "You mention him now and again."

"A JB of my very own?" says she.

An unfunny answer to an unfunny question.

"He's nice. He's acting kind of interested, since you asked, but - I wish I had an answer for you. I wish I had an answer for me. Here you and I both are, just trying to have a fricking vacation - and the damn dog we're minding up and dies, you meet Mr Wonderful - and yes, I think Edward is _wonderful _- and I make more friends in ten minutes here than I've made in ten years anywhere else. Then a lesbian tells the world she wants me. What's next? Will it rain frogs, Bo-bo? Will it thunder sunbeams and will the sky fall in and turn out to be dragon's breath and marshmallow?"

Go, Renee. No, Renee. The her Pip fell for so irrevocably. Whimsey and imagination and nuttiness and full of lively and lovely.

"She didn't tell the world, Mom. She didn't even name you. No-one would possibly know who that book is about beyond you and me - and you're weird, by the way. Did I ever say so before?"

"All the time. But, no."

Mom's smile coming right at me, the Renee special. Fond and proud, if I ever did anything quirky. Which I didn't, much. I didn't have quirky-itis. Courtesy of the recent divulgence, I find I have had Charlie-itis all along. A selective dive into the gene pool, awarding reticence and introspection. But I'm getting the fond, proud, Renee special now.

"Come here, you goose," she orders.

"_Swan_," I correct, and I go. I go. Enfolding arms of this strong, fragile woman are the grip of life and the grip of death. I never knew. She is the earth and the sky, she is metal, air and wood. All combined in a mysterious alchemy that I am awed to be a part of. She frustrates the hell out of me, but I carry her mitochondria. Born holding the egg that could be Isabella, it lay in wait with its sisters for the soldier of the dark night, the dark knight, until he came to meet his destiny. Any one of a hundred thousand babies could have come to her, and she got me. She did her best, her very, very best with the hand she was dealt, and I am inexplicable to her. She loves me regardless.

I hug her back with a deep, deep conviction.

"Oohmph," she wheezes. Have to ease up so I don't kill her with my love.

"Would you mind if I was a kitty-kisser?" says she.

"Oh,_ Jesus_, Mom! Shut up or I'm leaving town."

"We're both leaving town, anyway. But does that mean you_ do _mind?"

Touched that she should even care about my approval, my opinion. She called Brown Mr Wonderful, so I know about _her _approval and her opinion. I knew anyway - she bought condoms, and made sure to get out of the house when he visited me so that he and I could be alone. She wants the person I want to be the person who can make me happy. I want the same for her.

"Mom - kitty-kisser, whatever. Whatever, whoever you are - I want you to be with someone great who appreciates you."

Is that clear enough?

"Seriously. Jim Bannerman, Pippa, someone who's good to you."

"Yeah, that's it, isn't it? We all want someone who'll be good to us. But honestly it's too sudden to think that things might just magically click into place for me, too out of nowhere. Don't get your hopes up. I'm not getting mine. This is all topsy-turvy and weird and I'm so wary of expecting anything, while at the same time wishing I could expect it all."

Well, I know how that feels - I've been living in that space for weeks. It takes your breath and your appetite and your sleep. Your atoms dance. You don't know how you retain your form, you're so electrified, and you get random sweeps of sensation like solar flares if you picture a single word that he said, or you hear again a look thathe gave you.

So, yes, I know, Renee. Whirled.

Although - I don't know, really. It was like that with Brown almost straightaway, but my mother in her resolute indecision has quashed any possible thoughts of that nature about her early friend. At least for now.

And the blow I have taken as to my legitimacy has thrown me. Not my _legal_ legitimacy - I couldn't give a damn about that - but the sure and quiet determination I've nurtured all my life that my parents were star-crossed lovers. I care far too much for Renee to resent her, I understand her newly too well to castigate her, and I feel for her too heartfully to blame her.

"Anyway, Bo, how are _you_ feeling about this?" as if she needs my stamp of approval on her teenage and current behavior.

I'm teetering, since you asked, but, "Fine. A little wobbly, actually, but still upright. I'm really sad about Charlie."

"Me, too."

"I hope things get less muddy for you with Pippa."

"Thanks, baby. Have you heard of the airport test?"

"No."

"It's when you haven't seen somebody for a while, and you're not sure how things are between you, and you have to pick them up at the airport. Your very first impression on seeing them will tell you the truth of what your heart wants."

Back to whims, mother? But equally you could term it intuition, or gut instinct. Who knows, maybe it's true. "Guess we'll find out pretty soon, then."

"You know, Bo, if I had to meet you at an airport every day between now and forever, I'd love you every single time, with never a moment's doubt."

Tears prick at my eyes, while hers are blue and steady and sure.

"Same for me with you, Mom."

"That's my girl."

Quiet now, tiny then louder, stretching out as the day progresses. Calm though - not a full and bursting quiet. One with space.

I know some people arrive at a self-settlement best by spilling it all, and doing some kind of bounce-off thing, where their nearest and dearest offer helpful, counseling advice and suggestions. Not me. Others may weigh it all up and consider carefully - I'm not like that either. I'll internalize, the issue will become pure cloud, and I'll dizzy at it in brackets of moments until the cloud disperses, revealing my answer. I'm not an analyst; not scientific, or mathematical. I disappear the issue and the vectors until the answer is a slow fog of clarity. I kind of know the foreglow for now, anyway. The present-glow too. It's not anyone's fault. There was a human chain of events, with a human result. I am no more and no less in how I came to be than anybody else, and though a sorrow I never fully understood until now has always been a part of my makeup, it doesn't define me. I could choose to think of it as enriching if I'm prepared to accept it.

One step forward, one step back. Trouble is, I don't end up at my starting point. I'm not the Isabella Swan I have always thought I was.

"Maybe we'll have a better perspective on all this once we've left," Renee, the optimist.

Get to the corner, and he hasn't gone at all, he's waiting.

"What do _I_ want? _Come here_." Growls, pounces, like I'm prey.

I'm caught and held, that safe encirclement of his arms that isn't safe at all. It hasn't stop me from falling. Suzy does what she does, trying to join in.

"I want_ you_. Us. To make this work. We'll do it. Interstate flights don't cost much. You know, maybe in a way, this will be good. If you were around I wouldn't be able to study. I wouldn't let _you_ study. I'd be demanding and whiney."

"Whiney Edward?"

"Oh, yeah. I'd be all_ Oh_ _Bella_, I left my pencil with you. Can I come by? _Oh_ _Bella_, I need you to help me revise. _Oh_ _Bella_, will you read to me? _Oh_ _Bella_, my piano doesn't sound right unless you're sitting on top of it."

I like whiney Edward. He has me smiling.

"You have a piano?"

"Of course. Do you have to get home or do you want to come over to my place? I could introduce you."

And my head tips to his shoulder as we walk, giving me a different angle on the world. We're at his door when he stops me.

"Just quickly, a question. Although I don't want a quick answer. Can I ask you now, and you go away and think about it?"

"Ah - sure." No idea what he's talking about.

"Actually, no. I won't ask now. I'll ask you later, because you have to have a clear mind to answer. As clear as possible, anyway. Away from my influence."

_No_ idea.

Stumbling into the front hall, I've tickled him because I can't keep my hands away - and why would I? and he's laughing helplessly, as we're waylaid immediately by Esme. Delighted to see us, wanting to chat with me. So lovely. I want to chat with her too, almost as much as I want to fool around with her son upstairs in his bedroom. Standing where she can't see him, he blows kisses. I can't possibly be impolite enough to bring the conversation with Esme to a close so I nod and smile and reply to everything, despite the distraction. The growing urgency.

He is champing at the bit, I can see the desire in him, but Suzy is the one who rescues us both. The naughty hound appears suddenly with a shoe in her mouth, exasperating Esme and liberating her son and his guest. Esme scolds and gives chase, and Brown and I take the stairs two at a time.

"Here we are, then," he says, shutting the door.

I browse his bookcase, which I didn't get the chance to do last time I was here. First and uppermost, music, composers, composers, music. Then downwards, a backwards chronology. Sci-fi, spy stories, the phases he went through. Watching me peruse his life, though books don't tell me everything.

"Have you brought girlfriends here before?"

"Yes. No. Well, I've brought _girls_ here, and I've brought girl_friends_..."

Stupid question, Isabella, and you totally asked for that lurch in the belly.

"But I haven't brought anyone here and - made out, if that's what you're asking."

He's sitting on the bed, arms held up, inviting me to stand before him.

"You're the first. Well, the only. _We_ could make out, if you want."

Of course I want, but - hesitate. I don't like thinking of him with other girls. Wouldn't like to estimate how many there have been. Wouldn't like to know. Enough to have made him so confident, so sure with his caresses, so able.

He interrupts my train of thought.

"This blouse. It suits you but I'm afraid I have to undo the buttons."

Exploring. "Your bra is front-fastening? God loves me. Oh."

Smirk and wickedness. "Now guide your boobie to my mouth."

_Guide my boobie_? I stagger, laughing, and my boobie and its identical twin jiggle in front of him.

"Ooh, yeah," and he's grabbed both boobies, shoving his whole face into my chest. I'm still laughing, but his lips find me and it's not so funny any more. He's not laughing either when I push him back down and pin him. He's hard, right there, my thighs accept him and admit him, and my clit is on the launch pad. Five, four, three, two - already close.

"Oh no you don't, missy. We still have far too many clothes on."

Silly, happy, so horny, both of us. You're right, and I want your dick. I want your laughter and your voice, and your words, and your everything. I love you.

"I love you."

"What?" Hands on my shoulder, pushing me back so fast I gasp. "_What?_"

You look shocked, Brown, makes me feel bad, so don't make me say it again.

"_What did you just say?_"

Shut up. Your eyes are green and daring, your hair is fucking stupid crazy and your stubble is part brown, part orange. _Orange!_ What are you doing questioning me, Mr Orange Stubble?

I love you. It's a bit of an elusive concept to me, slippery and admiring, loyal and aching, an always, underneath knowing, with a coverlet of whoops, I'm aslant. It's a concrete concept too, after the afternoon I've had.

I love you. I know exactly what it is, now. I've known it all my life, it's what my father gave me besides my dark eyes, and what my mother gave me unquantifiably, in her elusive way. I will love truly, and I will love wholly.

But it's too fucking big for me right now. I need - I need - who is Isabella Swan and what am I going to do with her? What I can't do is abandon university for hot kisses and licking that line of dark hair down your abdomen, following it after its disappearance, and on to a pearl-drop, salty tip.

And work here in a flower shop, or for Mr Ninety, linking sausages. I want to think, I want to learn, I want to _know. _Know _me._

"Um," I say, shooting Brown and myself down with my non-committal.

"You said you love me. Well, I love you, too. So we agree. We're both in it. We're even," he says. Hands at my waist. My waistband. My button and my zip.

"You love me? Love _this_."

Tongue. Oh, _fuck_. On, at, in the pink of me, his favorite color. Tracing the raspberry swirl he summons forth my own tiny erection, not hard like his, but puffy and swollen when he is giving me so much dedicated attention.

I stop him before it's too late, before the little silent thunderclaps and the ripples that exit through my fingernails and toenails and scalp. Hey you, get up here, _now_. Ignoring his momentary protest. Mouths, chests, hips - we're aligned. He's in.

My thighs to his, embracing.

"Bella, if you do that - I can't last. It makes you tighter."

I don't know why I'm holding him with my legs but not with my hands, fingers fluttering in his hair, on his arms, his cheekbones. He's moaning, pushing, thrusting, panting, trying so hard for me. His every surge I meet, triumphant.

"Bella, it's fucking incredible for me - are you close?"

He can hardly speak. "I - hope - you're - close."

Then head bowed, he makes the lunge he makes when he climaxes that I know, I crave, I exult in. I'd be projected through the headboard if not locked so securely by his grip under my ass, his other arm beneath my neck.

When my inner circle tightens, it threatens his blood supply. He's told me my body does this. He's told me he thinks I could kill him. "Le petit mort," he said, "You make me know I'm alive."

Now he almost shouts, noisy when I peak, so loud in his pleasure. No way Esme can't be hearing us.

Kissing, stuck together by damp skin till he rolls away just far enough to pull off the condom. Makes a triangle of his arm, props his cheek on his knuckles, recumbent and lambent on the sheet we just consecrated.

"Seductress. Tempting me with your sweet wiles, and your sweet ways, and your sweet words. What was it you said?" Eyes have turned forest dark.

"I love you."

He doesn't look as happy as I might have expected.

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I'm writing for the twilight25 as jackqueenking. fyi.


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